


Thanatos, Eros, Milquetoast

by Albrecht_Starkarm



Category: Black Lagoon
Genre: Existential Crisis, F/F, F/M, Foot Fetish, Foot Jobs, Never Too Drunk to Fuck, Psychosis, Roanapur's Traditional Murder and Mayhem, S&M, Self-Doubt, Self-Loathing, clothing fetish, leg fetish
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-19
Updated: 2017-02-19
Packaged: 2018-09-25 11:34:52
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 30,053
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9818570
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Albrecht_Starkarm/pseuds/Albrecht_Starkarm
Summary: When you live like a wolf, amongst wolves, you become a wolf.





	

The truth was that Rock didn't belong. It wasn't exactly an elusive and abstruse truth, either. Ray Charles could have seen it from the United States while loitering at three on the Glasgow Coma Scale. And worse than anything, _he_ knew it. There wasn't even the comfortable obliviousness that was shelter like the emperor's vaporous wardrobe. Even if it was transparent for everyone else, at least _he_ wouldn't have known.

He did. It was something fantastical. Shuddering with the adrenaline still caroming through every vein, racing back and forth and back and forth between his ears, pummeling that meat behind his eyes he was _reasonably_ sure was a brain into a numb paste, it just felt... Perfect. Serendipity. Fate.

It was perfection. The _fuck you_ to the cold-eyed gray Capitalist Stalin that had straddled his life without even _noticing_ him; had ground him into dust under a hundred thousand yen heel without even understanding what the crunching was; had declared him _dead_ , sent a fucking mercenary company after him to expunge some corporate inconvenience. And it was courage. At least, Rock was reasonably sure it was something someone somewhere could call courage, conviction. For anyone else, some- some boisterous Yankee like Revy or Dutch or even _Benny_ , laconic and unassuming as he was, well, it was just Tuesday. If someone tried to have you killed, the _least_ you'd do is give them the short shrift. Not the Japanese, though.

He was a conciliator; he was a negotiator; he was a man for whom life was about dipping just a little deeper in your bow than your colleagues, scraping just a little more enthusiastically, investing just _another_ minute more in that self-flagellating professional discipline that would probably have only one fucking destination: Karōshi, that most exalted token of company spirit. Either that, or cirrhosis from the endless _morale_ parties they inflicted on their staff, some facile rationale for the asshole management to get shitfaced on company time with company cash and probably siphon off more than a few yen for their own pockets.

He could have returned. Maybe _should_ have. A promotion was his: Assistant manager. It was fucking ridiculous. Revy would've snorted, brayed that hot rasping laugh over it.

_Jesus, Rock, that sounds like a good trade: Guy tries to have you whacked, and you get to watch the store when he's jerkin' off in back._

And maybe it was true. It was ridiculous. But what could he do? Extort more? He wasn't a yakuza. And, besides, it wouldn't matter: The system was the system, less a constellation of laws and more an inflexible _institution_ built around those sharply chiseled lines and boundaries and obligations. You did, and _they_ did, and there was the predictability in it that made it work because it _needed_ to work.

And with the boss, well, what the hell could he expect? He would've needed to toil for another ten or fifteen years in the department to make assistant manager. And with Kageyama- _buchō_ as a mentor, Rock's loyalty _also_ a furtive little spine twisted in his skin, always uneasy about when he'd maybe spill to _someone_ about what Asahi had done, well, his path would be well-lubricated. He'd probably be engaged to Kageyama- _buchō_ 's daughter. Not that he'd ever even seen her: Whether she was pretty wouldn't have mattered, either, or even if they had a rapport.

Because that was the system. Those were the dimensions, the leylines that guided everything. And Rock would ineluctably creep higher, and higher, and higher, and he'd feel his flesh slough off, his bones melt, meat and muscle and fascia deliquescent, and he'd be remolded into Okajima- _buchō_ when Kageyama mantled up to _shachō_ , and then...

Then he'd still be knelt and kissing ass 'til his lips tingled numb and his jaw ached, but in an office that lorded over the city, one of the wizards behind the great anonymous gilt-brocaded curtain that presided above the Japanese economy. He'd have a top-heavy secretary who'd let her eyes grow dull like everyone else's when he bent her over the desk and he'd never see the compulsory children he'd have, a minimum of a daughter to marry off and a son to succeed him and he'd grow fat but not _intemperately_ , and his game would become golf, and he'd feel only his wife's wintry apathy when he stole home once or twice weekly.

And then he'd be retired, the Big Man, with a woman who had no interest in even listening to him or admitting that he existed in her lean surgically-perfected grace. Well, he'd probably have expired before that, anyway, not even daring to clutch his chest or screech his mortal despair into a telephone, because that would be indecorous. As a corporate samurai, he would face death blissfully in his noble tailored vestments and maybe even scrawl out a last waka in tribute to a hope for a life reborn seven times in Asahi's servitude.

And then he'd be dead. A wretched mirthless cold-lipped ghost of a man finally just becoming _only_ a ghost. Maybe he'd haunt the motherfucker to sit in his office next and chortle over having kicked over the big man's corpse whose ass _he'd_ needed to kiss. His secretary would probably squat on his headstone and squeeze out one, too.

But what the hell was he doing here? Was it that absolute, that binary? He could just skulk back to Japan, slip his passport and birth certificate across some gray cold desk in a gray cold office and have a gray cold bureaucrat stamp it with the ritual incantations that would beat him back into life.

_Ah, Okajima-san, so very sorry. Please, accept our apologies, and have our assurances that this sort of thing doesn't happen all the time. But sometimes accidents are unavoidable, respected taxpayer._

Because that's all he would be. Maybe he'd even need to pay the _back_ taxes. Fuck, were his parents collecting bereavement payments or even some of his backdated salary? Or maybe his asshole brother, the bastard who'd shamed him by slipping with that facile cram-school grace into the bureaucracy's sainted penguin ranks, who'd fueled the long-suffering parental sighs, the heads shaken, the _why can't you be more like your brother?_ whispers while he studied and studied and studied in the kitchen in a fug of sweat and stale ramen and didn't even get _laid_ 'til he was nineteen?

So what the fuck did it matter?

Wasn't there an alternative? He wasn't a shootist like Revy. He didn't have that easy grace with violence's alchemies. He wasn't like Dutch, either. Or even Benny. He... What was he? He was just a fucking middle-manager. Still.

Well, it was a promotion. He wasn't a junior assistant to the assistant-manager of Asahi Heavy Industries' resource department. But his life was still paperwork's great pallid blizzard; was still more papercuts than any real adventure. And that was wonderful, wasn't it? He wasn't Revy. Or Dutch. Or Benny. He couldn't just fling himself with that fatalism, hell, maybe that _nihilism_ into that deadly trade they worked like it was just a nine-to-five job.

It was freedom. Rock knew _that_. It was the unhinged perfect liberty that came from walking a tightrope without a net. And sometimes without a rope. It was about bearing yourself aloft with will and violence and simple snarling sweating bloody _fervor_. Darwin clearly had seen something like Roanapur in its ugly brutality when he put those words to paper.

But Darwin would've shit himself with revulsion if he'd ever _really_ visited that land of the living dead. Would've scrabbled across the causeway and had the _Beagle_ weigh anchor and rush back to the Isle of Wight. It was a living funeral; every day was the Day of The Dead. The whores whose dull empty eyes leered out with the enticements that didn't even need to be made; the shots' slow dull _clap_ tolling through grimy rat-warrens of alleys; the markets where the words black and white and gray had shrugged off even the tiniest pretension of meaning, frolicking in commerce's hungry grasping immediacies, anything and everything, from tee-vees that fell off the back of freighters to human flesh, still bleeding or just bloody. The bars whose smoky ambiance was animated with a wraith's despair; the shithole clubs where women with mirthless flat plastic smiles swiveled around in plastic shoes on tarnished steel poles and peddled plastic lust for a pittance.

The clubs where they fucked each other and animals and children for the deadened throng's simple need to feel _anything_ , even if it was only in the last few hot sprays of guilty transgression that could be wrung from a numb soul.

And then there was Rock. He knew nothing about Dutch; the man should have been _inscrutable_ 's spokesmodel. If dictionary entries had spokesmodels. Rock was sure that was just another industry in Japan or maybe Korea. Revy, well, she was definitely a candidate for ambivalence. Brute sledgehammer simplicity but he could taste the depth that maybe wasn't depth at all but just wishful thinking, a simpleminded need to believe that hard women, hard _people_ , were really just like everyone else, cradled in crusted scars and calluses but with hearts of gold and soft gentle souls and besides, there must have been a compelling Hollywood-perfect story about how she _got_ those scars.

Right?

And Benny, well, Benny was Benny. He might've been the wickedest of all of them.

Except for Rock. Because Benny was still running from _something_ , still had a death sentence as sure as a guillotine whispering its cold siren's song waiting for him in Miami. But Rock? Rock was there by choice. He was sure there was that for Revy and Dutch and Benny, too.

But how much of it was the false choice of life in Roanapur or death in an alley reeking of shit and piss and stale garbage in America?

He didn't know. His fingers cradled the cheap pen that was any office's, scrawling out quick neatly-ordered figures in the appropriate columns. A bootleg _Sorny_ calculator lay with its wide stupid face leering up at him in drab black digits beside the pages. The efficiency reports were his patience's monthly calvary. You couldn't tabulate them on a biweekly basis. The _Lagoon_ was too temperamental for that; Dutch and Benny meddled, tampered, obsessively _adjusted_ it at regular intervals, and needed to know whether they were just burning cash or actually contributing something to a career for which time really _was_ money.

Sometimes, time was survival.

“Yo, Rock.” Dutch's vast black silhouette, less protected and more just _bound_ with that thick-necked olive-drab flak jacket like some medieval spook story about armor made animate and given spirit by some dreadful sorcery, filled the office's door. Rock's eyes flitted up with a quick jerk to the clock poised over the man's vast bald promontory of a head.

It was already eight at night. He'd been working for hours on the reports; papers lay heaped neatly, and there were still at least fifteen pages left. The hands tormented him with their slow sulky flit like a petulant child's game, black stripes staining a creamy guileless face.

“Hey, Dutch.”

“You've been workin' awhile. I hope not all the letters and numbers are startin' to look the same.” The man's voice was a thick soup of syllables curdled and ossified into gravel and then ground together into sound more menacing than Rock had ever heard. It wasn't rage or wrath: Dutch was unflappable. A rocket's rush over the bow, and he'd hear it over Revy's squalling bloodlust and even Benny's tight-lipped agitation through the radio, obsessively distilling reality to mathematical arcs and geographies. _Did somebody just shoot a missile at us, or was that the toilet?_

Rock wasn't any of them. Couldn't rejoice in the mayhem like Revy and couldn't distance himself in Benny's scholarly pretensions and he sure as hell wasn't Dutch. He was terrified, and it was that simple. He could feel his life not even patiently bleeding from his veins in some bleak Roanapur alley with a razor dragged across his neck or a bullet settling heavy in his gut but just _nihil_.

But the rocket missed. Sailed over the deck, only a few _feet_ , and Rock caught a glimpse of the horrible pitted scuffed silhouette wheeling through the sulfurous sunset. Revy's answer was with an immediate mortal eloquence: Her own RPG, heavy-bodied tube no more menacing than a bit of plumbing, suddenly snapping off a thick gunpowder blast and in an instant there was only wreckage slipping slowly into the bobbing tide, boiling with black greasy smoke.

And then he was there, in another office, even if it was rustic without being coldly consciously austere-by-Ikea, that aesthetic people who were too lazy to bother remembering what country they were in called _international_. But it was just bland and frigid.

This was only cool with the air-conditioner that rattled its soft coughing relief through the tropical sunset slopping hot and tangerine across a table that was his desk for the day.

Dutch dragged out one of the mismatched parliament of weathered chairs; Rock had taken the only one that wasn't probably banned on six continents as an implement of torture, but Dutch wasn't ordering him out of it. Bare iron legs screeched across heavy hardwood slabs. Dutch was a likeness of a chocolate-marble mountain fashioned with an exacting attention to detail by a sculptor that obsessed over muscle in vast rippling slabs, adored wiry definition, and exulted in veins like braided steel cables splitting tight unblemished skin.

The guy was ageless, like the few black people Rock had met; they were like most Asians, just drifting above gravity until they finally succumbed to their eighty or so years on a single birthday. Fingers like articulated sausages gripped the chair's back; his heft sagged into it with a long slow sigh.

Cheap cigarettes became an object of legerdemain, coaxed into the big man's hands; a practiced muscle-memory flourish, rapping at a wrist to toss one into a palm before his lighter, burnished age-tarnished brass, rasped and snorted and coughed up vacillating orange flame crested with raspberry. It was an oily hot aroma on Rock's nostrils, uprooted in an instant with smoke's rank kiss.

“You doin' okay, Rock? I notice that you hole yourself up in the office after a job goes bad like that. This your coping mechanism? 'cause it's great for the bottom-line, but I don't know how good it is for _you_ , my man.” A finger outstretched at him like a gun's barrel. Lethal allegation, delivered with the shot-quick perspicacity Dutch always had.

Rock was never sure if Dutch was just some wayward soldier or a college psych professor that decided to reinvent himself in Thailand with an Olympic weight set. The eyes were unknowable behind opaque sunglasses that felt more like welder's goggles to Rock. He'd seen them off his boss' nose approximately twice, and the eyes terrified him.

They were like Revy's, and not at all. That essential violence, but with a fire that had patiently and slowly eaten itself to an inverted warmth, a chill so deep it still bled flame. Revy's was a fulminating hatred that would free itself like a mental patient with a straitjacket just a size too large.

“I, ah, I'm okay, Dutch. I'd just... I'd like to get these reports finished.” It was alien. Hearing that concern from anyone, much less a superior. Much less with something like real interest beyond just the social incantations that some sensitivity training had formulated.

“Why? They're not due for another week.” It was true. Rock knew it was. “Listen, my man, you're gonna burn out eventually. And when that happens, what then?” Since when was Dutch _this_ involved? “I'm only telling you this because you've been with us for a few months now.

“You're one of the crew. Not just a short-timer.” Was that true? “You can go back, of course, be Mister Japanese again.” And that was true, too, wasn't it? “Just like Revy could go back to New York, and Benny to Miami. And me to, well... Wherever it is I came from.” The huge fists creaked together now. “If you burn out, it's gonna be on me.

“Not Revy, and not Benny. So what's eating you, Office Man?” What was it, exactly? “Just fear? Because you handled yourself well. You're not the gunman type. In all fairness, Benny isn't, either.”

“He works the computers. He's...”

“Yeah, Rock?” It was awful. That sense that he was being flayed, muscle and tissues teased away, something _fundamental_ at his core just scrutinized and appraised. Dutch knew, didn't he?

“He's useful, I guess, as more than an office drone. I'm good with filing, with the reports, with... With negotiation and etiquette, I guess. But you can do that, right, Dutch? At the end of the day, aren't I just another pair of hands?”

“Yeah. Pretty much.” It was an iron hand fastened around his gut. Bile seethed like an acid cocktail. “At the end of the day, pretty much everybody's just another pair of hands. I've got mine on the controls; Benny's got his on the computer. Revy's got hers on her steel.

“And you? What do you do, Rock?”

“I already told you-”

“Nah, you just said how you _work_. People bring more than just the sum of their skills to a job. A guy like you's gotta know that. You worked, right? Had a straight job. You were a workaday Joe, or whatever you call yourselves in Japan, right?”

“Actually, in Japan, that's _all_ I was.” Rock let his eyes drift to the table, to his hands. They'd become coarsened, hadn't they? Not callused like Revy's in a negative of the shape violence had taken for her, those sinuous pistols' geometries. “I don't want to sound like I'm complaining about the past-”

“Do I look like Revy, Rock?” It was true. That _was_ the alarm that twanged like an overstrung guitar's strings behind his eyes.

 _Jesus Christ, ya dumbass, do I look like I give a fuck about your exciting adventures of ass-kissing overtime back in Tokyo? Clean the fuckin' bathroom if you're gonna obsess over_ shit _._

“I don't like boring people.”

“Sure ya do, Rock. If you didn't, you would've just said, _Everything is fine, boss_ , and not given me those puppy eyes.” He could feel a mortified flush blasting up through his cheeks, volcanic, bubbling, almost _indigo_. “But that's fine. Everyone likes complaining. Everyone is boring, really, even to themselves.

“I'd bore the shit out of people, too. But that's not how it works. Complaints go _up_ the ladder; not down.”

“That's not how it works in Japan.”

“Well, you're not in Japan now.”

“To your employers in Japan, you're just a replaceable part. You barely even have a name. They remember it, sure, but you always catch them stumbling over it, even when you've got a name as common as mine. You're just a suit sitting at a desk in an office.

“Everyone's like that. It... It sucks, Dutch. It _sucks_. Sitting in an office every day; getting up at six in the morning so you can cram yourself next to thousands of other people who don't even have eyes, who don't even have faces, to ride a train that reeks like the millions of people that've ridden it, and you count yourself lucky if you even get inside before it takes off.

“And that's the highlight of your day. Maybe you'll get to stand next to a pretty girl who doesn't even know you exist, and you can just stand there or sit there and not even fantasize about her body but just about the idea that you're actually _with_ someone warm. But then it's too goddamn hot, and then you're pissed off that she's so close to you.

“Sometimes, it's a high school girl, and then you just feel like a degenerate. Sometimes it's a married woman, and you see the ring on her finger, and you know that she's alone and lonely because her husband's just like you are. You think about _your_ wife having to wait around doing nothing because you're going to work if you're even lucky enough to get married.

“And then you get off the train and you walk into the office and you keep doing the same busywork nothing you were doing yesterday, and it's like time didn't even happen. And then you sit around in an office that stinks like cigarette smoke and cleaner and you try to pretend that the sexy office ladies-”

“The what?”

“Secretaries, I guess. They're... I don't know how to put it. Do they have ladies like that in America? They're pretty and young and they... I mean, they do filing and copying and stuff, but mostly they're everyone's mothers? They'll take your suits to the cleaners and even iron them for you; they'll make tea and bring your lunch in, too.”

“Jesus. That sounds more like a wife. Do they put out, too?”

“Everyone fantasizes about it. No one ever does anything.” Rock finally indulged himself with the cigarette whose L&M-branded hunger had been the razor's edge raking at his raw nerves to spur him on with the paperwork that could tranquilize a rabid hippo. “I- I mean, _I_ never did, anyway, and all of the middle-managers and the other office guys like me...

“We always talked about it. That sort of stupid guy talk that makes you feel embarrassed to be alive.”

“I know the kind. I was in the Marines.” Even that felt like something almost miraculous. It was enough to send paranoia's hot frisson through Rock's every nerve. The last time Dutch had been _that_ congenial, he'd been sent plunging into a dead submarine's cold iron sepulcher and almost twisted into a sieve bobbing mournfully in the sapphire waves' sun-kissed calm before slumping into the depths with a garden of human Nazi memorabilia.

“I, ah...”

“'s the matter, Rock? You're looking a little queasy.” He knew that he was. “Cigarette not sitting well?” It wasn't the cigarette. Rock lingered on it, dragging deep a gasp of the acrid smoke that suddenly had abdicated any real flavor or texture or _anything_.

“It's, ah, it's nothing, Dutch. I just-”

“You're thinkin' that I've got something nasty for you to do, coming in here all congenial, right?”

“Now I'm wondering if you can bend spoons, too, like Uri Geller.”

“Nah. I do it the old-fashioned way. Psychic powers.” The smile was sawtoothed, ferocious. Rock could _feel_ it; radiated a cool and undifferentiated menace. It wasn't even for him. It just poured from Dutch, flesh hardened with a pachyderm's coarseness against a world of tigers with hungry jaws.

“I'd almost believe you, you know, Dutch. I, ah... Benny and Revy are out, huh?”

“Yup. Revy's at the Flag. Benny's... You know what? I don't know what Benny's doing. I don't need to babysit him, of course. If he's in trouble, he'll call.”

“And if Revy's in trouble?”

“Revy'd sooner die than admit she is.” That crocodilian smile crept again across Dutch's lips. “I wonder if you're the kind of guy that'd die for his pride.”

“Ah, I don't think so.”

“No? 'cause it looks like you're working yourself to death. Ain't that what you ran away from when you left Japan?” Was he running? Rock knew, ultimately, that he was. The man named Okajima Rokuro was legally dead, yes, but what did that matter?

Dutch obviously wasn't just consecrated as _Dutch_ because it occurred to someone to tell him that it was his name. Just like Revy. Rock had some vague inkling that she must have had a name once, Rebecca Lee, but a long and ugly ordeal had twisted and broken and melted down and recast her constituent atoms into the snarling psychopath named Revy.

Admitting that he _was_ Rock was something fundamental to that, too.

He'd started only thinking of himself as Rock. Didn't even bother with the name Rokuro anymore. Okajima? Who the hell was that. This was Roanapur; not Tokyo. Not anything close to Japan. The nearest it'd been was the Thais' flirtation with his people's historical embarrassment, an ugly vestige like the memories of a degenerate uncle you slam closed the attic door on and smother with a collective conspiracy of silence.

Roanapur wasn't even close to that. Roanapur was as it always had been. It was strange, feeling the venom, the venality, the simple _evil_ seep out of the soil and the aged colonial stone and the new brilliant glass-and-steel vanities like radon gas. It was part of its character; it lay in the blood, deeper than anything could ever uproot.

Crooks like Boss Chang and Balalaika and Verrocchio and the other alphabet soup of horrors in human effigy that drifted through its murk only harnessed it, only flourished in it, felt the nurturing warmth in its poisoned womb that incubated their violence and greed. That was the simple truth. And Rock was there, also; and Rock felt its amniotic throb, its distant heartbeat like a mother's hammering in graceful counterpoint to his own.

Was it that their rhythms had converged with it until they breathed and lived and ate and thought as one? Had it colonized _them_ , just like so many other souls?

“I- I'm not working myself to death, Dutch.”

“When did you start this stuff?”

“About eight this morning.” It was earlier.

“Twelve hours, boy. That's four hours too long. You're gonna drive yourself crazy. Besides, I don't pay overtime.” The truth was that Dutch didn't pay at all. It was a pirate crew; pirate rates, everyone accorded their share, however much Revy bitched about the useless pain-in-the-ass newbie barely pulling his goddamn weight.

“I guess you're right-”

“You're damn right, I'm right. I'm the boss. The boss is always right. I'm guessing you're still pretty uncomfortable with Roanapur. You'll go out during the day, won't you? I've seen you on Hongkat Street getting a shave, haggling with the old bags at Phong-Sap Market. So what's the difference?”

Was it the darkness? Rock let his eyes wander up to the window. The tropical sunsets were something so quick you'd miss them if you blinked for even a second, less a graceful syrupy transition through hues like a lurid purpling bruise and more just an implosion from sopping colorless daylight to night. And now its dregs had begun to die away, sulfur staining the lot in a weird baroque tenebrism.

“I dunno-”

“It's the nightlife, right, Rock? Hey, hey, don't get that look. I'm not reading your mind. I just know what it's like, being the new guy in a shithole like this. I remember walking around Khe Sanh and Da Nang alone. Saigon, too. Scary stuff. 'cept Roanapur's about a million times worse.

“At least they had the war to keep everything nice and level and sharp-edged. Here? It's a million tiny wars getting fought over god knows what and the battle lines and the alliances change every second. I'm not talking about the big boys like Hotel Moscow and the Hong Kong people and even the wops and the spics.

“I'm talking about every little gang.” Dutch's immense finger brushed over the scuffed pitted ink-stained table, drawing arabesque borders and then twisting back through them. “But that doesn't have anything to do with you, right, Rock?

“Unless you wanna be some little street gang's big bad accountant.” The laugh they shared was razor-edged and self-conscious for Rock.

“No, Dutch, that... That's not exactly something I think I could do.”

“Why don't you just take a walk? Don't worry. You're not an idiot. You're not just some fresh meat I'm tossing to the dogs.”

“Uh? I mean, I don't- I don't really know what's there in the city. There's the Yellow Flag, but that's a ways away-”

“No, no, I mean that you should go out in the downtown. Not up to the hills or off the freeway or anything like that. The city. It's a big city. Lots of space to walk.” Rock knew that he had _something_ ; it was Dutch's support, the Lagoon Company's stamp on his ass. It'd be more than just some miserable mope who might as well have been naked unless they had that ineffable _something_ that would catch one of the major families' notice.

Tourists and expats could largely strut around naked and unashamed and with a polar bear's impunity among prairie dogs. There was the accord with the local pigs, Watsap's crooked blue extortionists with dollar store costumes, that any attention was _bad_ attention. It was a city of vice. What suffering the miserable and poor and brown shouldered was their problem, and that was it.

Truth was that Roanapur _was_ a Disney World of sleaze, a place where you could not just shuck off your adulthood and wallow in a careless callow abandon but shrug out of your conscience and your humanity like a sweltering cotton suit and _regress_. And they did.

It was something that he'd seen. The jaded would chortle over it, the sweaty pasty foreigners and more than a few Japanese clattering through the streets like high school kids tossing off their stultifying uniforms on Okinawa and running amok.

But they wouldn't be luxuriating on the beaches and gawping at the dusky locals and slavering over sata andagi. They'd just buy the locals, leer at them while they twisted and writhed and spat ping pong balls out of their asses and their cunts and shit on the beach. They were ugly hordes of evil six-year-olds crammed into paunchy salarymen.

Would he have been one of them? Rock glanced at the window again, and at Dutch.

“Want me to make it an order, Rock?”

“Uh... I don't want to sound ungrateful-”

“Why, right?” _Was_ Rock just that predictable, that transparent, or had Dutch cranked open his skull and read his thoughts like tea lives or braille?

“Yeah.”

“Because I want to be alone here, and you're driving me crazy. It's why I asked Revy to take a hike and Benny to get lost, too. I thought you would've got the message.”

“Sorry-”

“Hey, it's your home, too. But it's my house. So get lost.”

So he did. Benny had taken the huge square-snouted Plymouth whose engine announced itself from eight or nine blocks, even through the city's babble of bleating horns and squawking voices and the usual lullaby of gunshots. Eda, the Ripoff Church's cold-eyed venal nun who was definitely inviting _some_ kind of divine retribution, had thrummed by with a Harley-Davidson that roared she was clearly compensating for something.

Revy mounted it with a Dykes on Bikes jab, racing off with her to the Flag.

And Rock had been abandoned. Alone. Not that it bothered him. And it did. It was pathetic. Blindingly fucking stupid. He knew it, too. That juvenile _crush_ ; that sophomoric desire stirring in his gut for her. It was more than that, though. It wasn't only the hungry twinge between his thighs, the guilty indulgences alone, consciously alone, grimy hotel room door thrown closed, latched, the air-conditioner's throb and a creaking colonial ceiling fan reducing the city's universe of sonic mayhem to his heart's own beat.

Slowly, slowly, slackening the tie's throttling noose, shrugging out of his shirt, feeling the surreality in muscle coalescing with a patient ordeal, splintering his skin darkening every day with the flaying tropical heat. Unfastening his belt and letting his slacks slump to his knees.

She would be there. The truth was that it wasn't only a superstitious fear but a simple reality that if she had even the tiniest fucking _inkling_ of the thoughts he'd loosed from that shackling psychic cage she'd not only murder him, because murder was just a casual and _compassionate_ act for her. It wouldn't be a quick and utilitarian mercy killing, one of those nine-millimeters' slugs crunching through his face, hollow points bronze tulips ripping a doggie door through the back of his head.

It would be slow. Lingering. Patient. That craved intimacy in a wicked parody, fingers raw and hot with his blood. It would be his. Dragged from the skin flayed from the fascia from the meat. He'd be lain bare, _exposed_. Everything. And she'd laugh. He knew that she'd laugh.

And sometimes _that_ slipped into the venom that pounded like some twisted mutant steam down every artery and wheezed back through every vein. His heart soared with it; could feel her lips. An esurient predatory thing; it wasn't only _ungentle_ but it denied gentleness, its very possibility. Long lean legs bared with that careless exuberance in her ragged Daisy Dukes twisting around him. He'd seen the muscle ripple through immaculate taut skin.

He'd even felt it. Incidentally, Revy hunched beside him, or a leg carelessly flung against his or even onto the table. The satin wet grace in that complexion like tawny oiled silk, wet with sweat. She'd drown him in that pungent bliss still forever crisp and fragrant with that delicious femininity he'd lap from the puddle gathering in her collarbone.

Her tits, fuck, he hadn't met many Asian women with tits like that, _smothering_ him.

_C'mon, Rocky-boy, aren't you the kinda mama's boy who wants the tit? Have some._

Dragged between her thighs. Not a plea, cooing, soft, sweet, his girlfriends' reedy AV-rehearsed caricature, but _shrieking_ at him. Commanding. Eat me. Eat me. He'd eat or drown, and he sure as hell wouldn't be content to drown, even if that would probably be the most beautiful death he could ever aspire to have.

Feel that tight clutching inferno coil around him. Pull him deeper, deeper, and it'd be an ordeal. There was no understanding in his fantasies; no gentle cooing, _Oh, it's okay, you can go again_. He'd taste her fist sledgehammering a bruise into his ribs, cracking on his jaw, if he didn't fulfill every snarled husky command.

_C'mon, do it harder._

_No, no like that._

_Softer. Harder now, dumbass. Can't you fuckin' **feel** what a girl wants? Figures a pussy like you'd have as much experience as a Trappist monk._

And it was almost true. And then it would be finished. He'd reserve it, always, _always_ , that knee-trembling perfection for when he'd crept closer and closer and closer and closer to that edge and couldn't fucking _stand_ the temptation anymore. It was like glancing at those fetid clubs whose neon marquees promised decadence and sleaze and defilement.

It was a cliff.

And there were those who just couldn't resist the _lust_ , the visceral and soul-ripping need to fall from them.

And he would be there. Eventually, he'd feel it, and no amount of denial, of gnawing paranoia, of simple superstitious self-denial and even the bliss luxuriating in those shivering white-hot moments before the leaden dull drab _nothing_ in being spent out across the sheets couldn't sustain it. Because men were fucking morons.

Rock knew that. They couldn't just feast like a fat man with the words all-you-can-eat. You could once. Even if it snapped up again, it wasn't that novelty when it'd gathered for a day or for a week or a fucking month.

He'd tested himself. And always found himself wanting. Craving her. Not just tromping through the heavily-trodden paths of commercial prepackaged sex in the porno that he'd seen, but just wandering through his own cravings.

Wet. Profane. And there were times when they wouldn't be so _submissive_. His own hands on her skin. Striping her ass; feeling that delicious firm flesh still so achingly round, and he knew it would be soft, just the tiniest kiss of softness, under his palm. A hot warble from her lips.

A screech. He'd slip his fingers deeper, deeper; know those intimate topographies and gorge himself on the wails and the hot breathless hitching screams she'd never admit to _anyone_ . Even if he'd taste that husky _I'll fuckin' kill you if you even breathe a goddamn_ _**word** _ _of this to anyone_ , she'd be his without reservation.

Skin wet with sweat darkening to a damp lucent luster tight gauzy lingerie.

Latex effulgent on her.

Chains; chokers; a leash to lead her around the apartment, drag her onto his lap, between his thighs.

The word _Master_.

Fuck, to hear that just _once_.

“Hey, dumbfuck!” And he'd...

“Hey, you stupid motherfucker! You deaf or somethin', asshole?!” It'd be fucking incredible. Her knees' tremors like overwatered jello.

Her pussy's sopping-

Fuck!

It was a heavy _crack_ on his shoulder. That lavish sweet sweat-perfumed universe not melting gracefully away like a retreating tide dragging away bits of the beach into that endless black abyss but a ballistic missile crunching into his dreamland.

“Whuh?” Oh, _shit_.

Yeah.

He was going to die. Because there was another wet _crack_ on his shoulder; a fist's hot knuckle-gnarled shape and it wasn't a delicate one and it wasn't just a comradely little swat like Revy obviously imagined her boxer's snap at his arm was. It was real; and there was a hand yanking at his collar, dragging him back like the swaggering gorilla of a phys-ed teacher that'd been his nightmare, a jumped-up thick-necked 'roided-up motherfucker whose veins and tendons and every bit of sinewy connective tissue exploded almost through every pore, whose hungers were for teenage girls without much ambiguity and for hammering at meek high school kids like Rock.

“Shit.” That was the word on his lips; twisting around and he could _feel_ his dress shoes' soles airborne for about a half-second when he was just jerked around. Confronted with two savage pairs of eyes set deep into faces that felt almost perfunctory, like the last weary labors of a horrible dark god that'd been busier with ornamenting its grotesque imagination's produce with muscle splintering bad greasy skin in vast ropey columns standing in an ominous relief through every inch; with shoulders so knobbled and so vast in their breadth they looked more like a relief map of the Rockies; with guts convex with an obvious strength.

And of course Rock'd somehow find _these_ jerkoffs; or they'd find him. It was his whole fucking childhood. He must've been born with the pheromone equivalent of a bulls-eye spurting from some glandular anachronism that missing links like these assholes could scent in its enticing spoor.

“Ah, sorry. What'd I do?” The morons weren't Thai; they spoke English, like Rock. Who the fuck were they? Huge and nebulously _white_. That was pretty much it. Pirates or street thugs slumming in an even more squalid hellhole than was their traditional haunt or jumped-up tourists who were tasting what they persuaded themselves was the perfect impunity in a place that wasn't any more lawless than anywhere else, because the law was just a clutch of fantastical ideals stamped on paper. It was that Roanapur was _honester_ than most other cities in its culture, just casting off the adorable pretensions that kept the sleaze and vice and vulgarity tamped down in the invisible places, the ghettos that weren't walled off with concrete but only the quiet conspiracies amongst people like Rock, like everyone else who could be counted on in their gratitude for not being in it, and their terrified knowledge of just how tenuous it was, to shut the fuck up and pretend they didn't exist.

In Tokyo, New York, San Francisco, Beijing, London, Paris, fuck, _anywhere_ , everyone knew _where_ they were, what they were, even if they were protean things, whispers that poured through society like a collective spook story. But they were kept away, at a polite distance, the lynch mob and the policeman just facets of a black gem that was a perfectly polarized lens. You could peer in, even _walk_ in for your vice, but they could never walk out.

Rock knew about Tokyo's, Ōsaka's, and he'd been there, even if only wading along the shore. This was just the deep pelagic, a bleak undifferentiated place where the light was only known because you felt the shadow.

The assholes were snarling, tough motherfuckers only with their muscle. But Rock glanced down, saw that the fingers fisted in his shirt's collar were _soft_. Sure, the fingers were callused, but they were bodybuilding calluses. Dutch was a patchwork of fine scars seaming his body; even Benny's fingers were gnarled from toiling on the _Lagoon_ and carving open his hands during his endless masturbatory work on the sleek Plymouth he'd not only fetishised but fucking _eroticized_. It was beautiful, but it sure as hell wasn't _that_ beautiful.

Is _that_ what Benny was doing?

“The fuck, man? Y'think you can just run into my buddy and not hafta apologize?” So that's what it was? Rock could feel something, well, it should've been terror, right?

In Tokyo, if some sneering _chinpira_ asshole accosted you, you could expect to have your ass kicked or at least drag out your wallet and make amends, even if you hadn't _done_ anything. Because that was the Law: The deeper Law. Because, if you brandished a fist, crunched it into the fucker's jaw, it'd be _your_ fault. Your fault for defending yourself.

And it wasn't worth causing a scene. A police report, even if you were just the _victim_ , would still be noted on your semiannual progress statement. If you were late, two minutes, you'd lose more than just ten thousand yen. So you paid. You paid because that was how it worked; because you'd always _learned_ and had known and had it hammered into you that that was how it worked. There were no other possibilities.

All reasoning was symmetrical, unassailably mathematically _perfect_ , and that was it. Everything was as it was for a very specific reason, even if that reason what something that no one had ever bothered clarifying for you or anyone else. It was faith. It was the New Man's New Religion and you obeyed just because you fucking did.

But this wasn't Tokyo. Rock felt it. The uncritical certainties not shatter. Fuck, no, they weren't melting down like fine crystal introduced to a brick wall like a hundred-mile-an-hour fastball. But there was a sharp _crack_ and it was creased, like a German slapping a sledgehammer at the Berlin Wall and finding it fissured like anything else.

His fingers were soft. Even _Rock_ 's were callused and creased and rougher than imagination would ever have allowed in Tokyo. When he glanced down, he saw it: His own hands were coarser, _harder_ , than this asshole's.

“I didn't run. I'm very sorry for not noticing you. I guess I was just lost in thought.” Rock was content now just to speak. Plainly and surely. The assholes' faces were ragged heaps of steroidal acne scars, twentysomethings or thirtysomethings with complexions like fifteen-year-olds, and probably testicles like toddlers.

“Yeah, right, motherfucker. You did it on purpose.” _This_ attracted attention. It wasn't the violence: It was the boisterous _stupidity_ in it. Violence in Roanapur was something that struck with lightning's unceremonious and almost divine swiftness. It came, thundered, and left as if it had never been but for the battered or broken or just bleeding heap of meat on the pavement. The reasons were meaningless, of course: Cupidity or hunger or just the need to feel _something_ , to know the last few squirts of feeling that could be squeezed out of the soul's spent husk.

Sometimes, it was just because. But there was usually an order to things. And this announced the two assholes as _outsiders_. It was just another street; not at the seamy core bathed in neon's glow and the whore's siren's song and not the almost _quaint_ avenues and boulevards that had stewarded their distinction and grace like an aging French beauty queen in colonial finery, old stone kissed with sunset's soft pastels and pricey shops and brown and yellow faces that stooped with the usual rite unless they had the cash and the juice to bleach themselves.

A familiar shop lay on the corner. It was a greengrocer's; one of the places Rock would visit if he had any interest in paying dollars for what hadn't just been scrounged out of one of the slum plots or the fields huddled in their fetid dank swamp outside the city. They didn't take baht, which always pissed him off, but any questions about it would just invite a long-suffering sigh from the wizened old crone behind the cash, a silent sentinel about four feet tall with skin like an old catcher's mitt and a shotgun taller than she was cradled in a stringy arm's crook.

_No take baht. Dollars. Take dollars. Nobody take baht. Baht shit. Nobody want baht._

Damn if that wasn't true.

And now his eyes were migrating to it; the hours had become as familiar as his own leg. 'til nine at night, and it was almost nine, and Rock had been counting on snatching up one of the peaches that almost _wept_ dewy sweet juices, would splash across his chin when he felt his teeth nip a bit at the velvet skin.

And it'd be closed. Bars shot in cold black along the grimy windows, misted with dust and diesel smoke.

“Are you going to let go of my shirt?” Rock let his eyes flick down to the asshole's hand again. The two of them just _stood_ there, grotesque identical twin Frankenstein's monsters from central casting.

“Motherfucker, you're gonna fuckin' _pay_ for that. You fucked up my bro's shirt.” Rock's stare flitted off to the second mouth-breather; the tee-shirt was a mosaic of sweat-darkened fabric and the dregs of meals half-remembered and obviously eaten with the fine attention anyone would expect from a brain-damaged six-year-old. “Y'get me, bro?”

He could just submit. It would be something simple; he was only carrying about thirty bucks. Rock had learned his second day that there was a naturalistic pickpocket hierarchy; the hustlers and true operators had their own remora, and it was almost a surrogate welfare system, a few coins snatched from the Big Men. The Big Men were masters at lifting wallets, plundering purses, even relieving you of your watch. It wasn't a just system; the place's fundamental barbarism would find them eventually unless they took the well-trodden path that whispered security's promise in the gang. He'd seen them. Some of them had even plucked something from his pocket, and he'd said nothing at all, just figuring that it wasn't worth the trouble, or even suffering some awful little pang of _pity_ that always had Revy braying about his naïvete.

That he was killing them with kindness. That nobody else was, and that was why _he_ couldn't be. That you shouldn't pretend to be a lamb in a land of rabid lions, 'cause the small rangy beasts needed to _stay_ callused and hard and tough. Let them get complacent for even a second, and they'd die when they met something that wasn't so forgiving.

And maybe it was true. But what the fuck did it matter? So they'd die, and it wouldn't be his fault, but at least... Or maybe it was just cowardice. Just the pathetic feckless _Japanese_ need for face, not to trouble himself with the bullshit.

It was only thirty dollars, right?

It was better than confronting the meat-grinder savagery that Roanapur, that spiritual catacomb, could invite. He'd seen men crumple across one of the Flag's tables in a puddle of their own blood and wadded brain and bone and hair for less. For nothing. The idiot joy in just feeling the pistol's kick, its heavy deep crack.

This was the fucking _bottom_ ; you couldn't fall deeper than this subterranean place where the sun was just a huge gibbous ball of gas leering down at you from over the horizon. What was thirty bucks, right?

“Fuck you.” It would have been so beautifully melodramatic for Rock to hear it percolating out of a distant place, as if he hadn't even spoken it; staring at himself from an out-of-body experience, astral projection, belted out of his own flesh by a manic new confidence or self-assurance or just berserker _wrath_ that would tear out his meek soul.

But it wasn't that. His gut still roiled; that anxious sharp electricity shot through his fingers. But it was just _that. Fucking. **Simple.**_

No.

What's mine is mine.

What's yours could _also_ be mine, because this is Roanapur. It wasn't _Rock_ 's city. It wasn't anyone's. Even those like Balalaika, Chang, the other gangsters that deluded themselves they could capture it in their ravenous fists still knew on some visceral level that it wasn't. It wasn't anyone's. It was a chaotic warp.

“You little _fuck_. What'd'ju saydame?” Rock was still marveling over the dumbass' finesse for cramming about a complete sentence into only two words before it occurred to him that he was still standing there; not flattened across the pavement. And it was obvious.

They were just fucking bullies. It wasn't the burglar's smash-and-grab hungers; not the pickpocket's avarice. There wasn't a fucking _end_ in any of it. It was to gloat over him, _feast_ on his prostration.

“Fuck you.” He felt it. His gut mantling up into his throat. The weightless _exhilaration_ in being aboard the _Lagoon_ , knowing nothing about the people with him, scarred and snarling and psychotic, but the simple will to survive. And that was it. “I said, _Fuck you_. Want me to say it again-” And that was a crack on his jaw.

Those soft knuckles that were obviously suffering from some gruesome bottle-tanning skin condition still _cracked_ at his jaw. He'd felt it before. It wasn't Dutch's, though; the asshole was obviously a swaggering goon whose entire life had been nothing but bluster, a pompous come-on fueled by simple size. Revy's fists were worse than that.

Probably even Benny's would've been. Rock wasn't a brawler; he'd still been cajoled, finally _coerced_ into being the one last member his high school _karate_ club needed. And he wasn't a _karate-ka_ ; he'd barely even qualified for their everyone-gets-a-participation-trophy meets with the other local high schools.

But he'd learned _something_ . And he'd had the shit beaten out of him too fucking many times by his asshole bosses when they were wasted and craving someone to abuse they knew wouldn't complain, because their only ambition was finally smarming and sleazing their way into _exactly_ that position like the younger brother who doesn't fantasize about jamming his fist in his asshole sibling's solar plexus and savoring the bile fountaining across the carpet but who salivates over having someone even younger and weaker to abuse.

And he knew what these fuckheads were. They were pricks like his boss. Like Sawamura- _senpai_ and Suzuki- _kabuchō_. They thought he was an easy mark.

Well, he was. He _was_ an easy mark. He was already reeling with the fist; not punch-drunk but just dazed. His brain had slapped back and forth between his forehead and his occipital bone and it was fucking _disgusting_ . Everything was just so goddamn _disgusting_.

So his knee was blasting up in a chorus girl's kick and just wagering that even the motherfucker's 'roid-atrophied little bobbin and petite peas could feel _something_ . And they did. The eyes blasted half-out from their sockets like some freakish _manga_ effect or maybe the American comic books he read just to _grasp_ the language while his parents sighed over what a fucking loser he was, not studying the rote bullshit like his older brother.

“W-wagh... M-mother...” And strength had not just fled but abdicated the kingdom and mounted its horse and thundered away across some distant horizon. The fucker was sagging, knees a muffled _crack_ on the pavement. And his buddy wasn't just immediately flinging himself at Rock. The moron's eyes slumped closed, oversized feminine lashes beating on his hamburger cheeks, before opening again.

And Rock was already springing at him. It was stupid. He'd caught something not just lucky but almost cartoonishly _perfect_ when that asshole snatched him up by the lapels. But the other moron was ungainly, musclebound and thrashing around like a spastic condom wadded with walnuts. A fist snapped out; another, and another, and it wasn't that Rock was the tiger lashing out at the great thundering elephant from the jungle.

It was only that Rock was lean, barely pushing five-ten, and about one-forty in concrete jeans, much less a cottony dress shirt and slacks. It was awe for him. Dancing, wheeling, hardly a practitioner of the sweetest science and still just being serenaded with a huge ungainly fist _cracking_ only an inch beside his head like the fifty-cals rattling their fury from that Luak bastard's smoke-wreathed steel shitheaps that'd hounded them and been slain like kittens with delusions of dragonhood under Revy's hand.

There was sweat. Anger. Real authentic rage. Felt it jerking at every sinew, ripping his jaws open into a snarl that even a blind man wouldn't have mistaken for a smile. It was bestial, a wolf's grin, slavering over it. He should've just _left_.

He knew it. Something distant was already warbling with a throttled and unsteady voice, grasping at purchase on those tenuous psychic reins. He shouldn't want this. This wasn't what he was. This wasn't his home.

Tokyo wasn't, either, but Rock didn't... Didn't really belong here, did he? It was a way station on the path elsewhere, wasn't it? Revy was beautiful; she was glorious, wicked, a ferocious and intoxicating enchantress, but that was it. It wasn't even a hope; it was a fantasy. It was all just fantasy.

Roanapur was like Kabukichō. It was a floating world that didn't _exist_ in any real sense; it had no anchor, no substance. It was vapor and mist and it would settle on your fingers and then spill through them when you tried to find a sure grip on it.

It had humans. But they were part of the illusion, too, because _no one_ wanted to be here; no one wanted to call it home. It was just incidental geography, more toxic than a vacation in Chernobyl. These assholes weren't natives.

But he wasn't, either.

So what was his right to do this?

And what right did _they_ have to do this?

“Let's just _talk_ about this, all right?” So he was being the mediator, the conciliator. He was giving them and _himself_ an out from this that would preserve that Oriental ideal more precious than your own fucking _life_.

Face. It was about Face. Giving them that.

“F-fuck you, punk.” The moron was huffing, wheezing, beetfaced. They'd attracted an audience. Even in Roanapur, well, maybe _especially_ in Roanapur, a street brawl wasn't something that happened every day. Shots' sharp hot crackle like firecrackers was _normal_ ; a knife's quick slide between the ribs or into the kidneys. But this?

Fisticuffs, and with one of them nursing a woe that announced perfunctory little balls already springing back up into the sternum, well, it was almost _tacky_. They weren't in Miami; they didn't thrive on dumb drunk college kids flinging their fists with a shitfaced brain-damaged rhinoceros' elegance at each other before they sprawled out in their own vomit.

They had a sense of decorum. That was for the Flag, for the other dives fetid with spilled booze and blood and cigarette smoke that had lacquered themselves like geologic strata on the walls and floors. Well, maybe not the Flag. That underwent sudden and violent and unexpected renovations a bit too often for the ambiance really to _take_.

“C'mon. Really. I don't want to fight you-”

“I'm'a kill you, y-y'fuckin' pissant-”

“I really _don't_ want to fight.” And then there was a sudden silence, stillness. The universe could have ended; a nuclear dawn may have been conjured over Roanapur, and, well, you could only call it history's most radical act of urban renewal since Nagasaki.

And it wasn't. He was still there. It wasn't that time had stopped; it was that the asshole whose fist was about a half-second from being flung at his face had just _frozen_. The jaw slumped open; the knees quivered; a long tortured wheeze bloated up from the trembling lips a tongue slopped over like a greasy overfed slug. Ruby tapers dribbled from a pinky froth sputtering up with a last strained breath. And then there was nothing.

He just stood there; Rock's head found itself quirking to the left, and then the right, studying the guy like an inquisitive beagle. A soft _rasp_ whispered through his ears, a quality like a razor being dragged through rare steak. The bastard crumpled like a marionette whose strings were introduced to chainsaw, a wet ragged heap of meat. It wasn't something cinematic; humans didn't die like on television. It was only every morsel of strength being torn out of the legs, gravity teasing him onto his back, arms tangled and legs twisted together with an unnatural look like the world's most ambitious contortionist. Eyes stared up at a cooling sky still striated with dying sunset.

He was dead; Rock couldn't imagine having ever lived in the naïve universe that had been his only a few months ago when he would have wondered otherwise.

Because it was obvious. That perfect stillness; piss' hot tang blackening his crotch and emptied bowels' warm pungent stink. Blood puddled, throbbing out with the calm unhurried insouciance of veins that knew they could start closing up shop for a permanent vacation.

And she was standing there. And not only _she_. She transfixed him, of course. The refugee from a dragon lady wet dream, legs long enough to raise serious questions about her mother's relationship with a giraffe cradled with a camp scarlet qipao that was approximately ninety percent slit, carved up along that luscious shapely sublime in alabaster skin kissed with color's most elusive tinge. It captured the dark; that was its meaning. She was Revy's achingly elegant elder sister, wreathed in a satin haze of hot blood and warm orchid where Revy's perfume was gunpowder and sweat.

Some distant idiot kernel of a brain cell was obsessively cradling the idea that maybe the Dragon Lady _didn't_ sweat at all. That fine silk would be ruined with the balletic athleticism he'd seen. A knife like a pygmy scimitar was being dragged back into her palm, tethered with a red cord drawn tight like the first strands of blood tugged up into a syringe.

Hair in liquid anthracite whirled around her with a perfectly theatrical wind teasing itself along the street. He barely even felt it. The blade was almost melodious in its whip through the briny air; her wrist's quick flit snapped off the blood, sent it rattling in an abstract expressionist across the street.

“Oh, you Lagoon boy.” The Dragon Lady's voice was a high musical trill. It was beautiful; it sopped into Rock's ears like cyanide-sodden honey. It wasn't Revy's, wasn't that husky hardness that brayed hostility for everything in the world. It was playful, jubilant, while wrists ringing with the soft song of gold bangles teased the knife down at the one surviving bastard that just knelt there on the pavement now, gawping at his less than dearly-departed buddy with the disbelief that ultimately everyone had when death visited them.

It wasn't even uniquely stupid or remarkably naïve. It was a simple instinct, the unwillingness to reconcile yourself with its perfect animal binary. Someone was alive, was a _person_ , a constellation of thoughts and experiences and words and then...

There was nothing at all.

“How slut doing? I not see her long time!” It was just something perfectly conversational. Because this was. What did the blood matter to her? Long flesh-ripping talons weren't _nails_ at all; manicured like rarefied faceted garnets twisted into knives more ferocious than even the ones that were sheathed in wicked arc along voluptuous thighs. “What matter?

“You okay, Lagoon boy? Oh, big dumb men not hurt you, right?” Was she legitimately _worried_? The eyes were usually inscrutable and half-invisible anyway, broad shallow almond slits limning red-shadowed slashes over high regal bones. They were almost closed now; they looked, well, looked like she'd smoked about a half-pound of grass. The smile wound itself in ruby lacquer over curvaceous lips whose smile was Revy's.

Rock still couldn't reconcile himself with a world where both Shenhua _and_ Revy were Chinese. But they had that commonality in their eyes, their smiles. The joy in mayhem, in slaughter.

“I, uh, I'm fine, Shenhua.” Finally dredged up the wherewithal to say _something_ from the soupy psychic murk like a river's silt.

“Oh, you such good boy! You not call me chinglish. Or _cunt_. Or _whore_. Or _anything_ nasty like slut. Or dese two _fuck_.” Jesus, her voice had gotten dangerous. And one of her fine dainty feet shod in slippers like the golden lilies he'd read about in _Hong Lou Meng_ was clapped on the surviving asshole's shoulder in a high kick that managed to be obscene with her dress' slit and dazzling in its athleticism.

It _hurt_. _Rock_ felt how much. There was enough muscle behind it to ripple through Shenhua's thigh.

“You _fuck_. You think you can fuck Mistah Chang? Mistah Chang very smart man. You very _dumb_ man. Only one dumb man left. You not get off easy like other dumb man. Mistah Chang say you get made example of, mu-tha-fu-cka.” It was slow, syrupy. “Okay?” And now high and jubilant again.

“F-fuckin' bitch-”

“Oh, dat not very smart. But you dumb. So I think is what I expect.” It wasn't a simple kick; it was enough grace and coordination on one leg to slam the other out perpendicular like a slug with her heel. The asshole's jaws crunched closed on his tongue; red was her color, and she indulged herself with it.

Fountaining from the moron's lips. Rock could have just left.

Or just asked Shenhua not to beat the shit out of him, that he was fine.

He could even have urged the submoron Neanderthal just to shut the fuck up. That Shenhua was not only one of those horrifying predators that stalked Roanapur's streets like Revy, like the Sister from the Ripoff Church, like... Like that fucking _maid_ whose costume must have only been a fetishistic and photogenic shell for a murderous gynoid from the future. Like so many others. But she was also Mister Chang's hitwoman. She was no simple errand-girl; she was the atom bomb, the human superweapon, the Triad dredged up when they needed something done or just enough menace to dissuade anyone from putting their finger on the trigger.

Just like Balalaika's _desantniki_ , the paratroopers who hadn't jumped out of an Antonov for a decade but who sure as hell hadn't atrophied with any of their other vocational skills.

Just like Revy for the Lagoon Company. Anyone who didn't recognize the fucking _silhouette_ was clearly not just _not_ a native but hopeless. Rock would have intervened. He knew he would have. Even a few weeks before. Or months. Or...

He would've felt it mantling up out of his throat, against his better sense. He would have interceded, even helplessly, spread out his arms and roared some beautiful homily about life's native worth, that whatever this asshole had done, killing or torturing or carving him apart like a Christmas goose sure as hell wouldn't correct it.

But Rock just felt... Exhausted. A deep sullen throb from his jaw hadn't dimmed that compassion; it just made it easier to _explain_ to himself.

And it would have been futile then, just like now, he was sure. Right? Because it _was_ surely futile to admonish a beautiful monster like Chang about _that_. Much less Shenhua, more beautiful and probably more monstrous.

“You fuck up Mistah Chang's girls. An' you no pay make better. An' then you too dumb to leave, to make chase _exciting_ for Shenhua. _I_ Shenhua. You see yoa' demoness, mu-tha-fu-cka. You make boring. You walk around Roanapur like owning the place, and it make no fun for _me_. I like chase. I like _hunt_. You like hunting dead rabbit.

“But Shenhua no kill you right now. Mistah Chang men take you.” And they were there. The familiar ravens in their immaculate suits. Shiny black hair and interchangeably Chinese faces. Shit, did _Rock_ look like that, too?

Almost, what, almost three billion East Asians, and did they really all pretty much just look alike? Well, a man whose eyes she'd gouged out still would have recognized Shenhua. And most Asian women he'd met were at least _pretty_. But the men? Chang had that pretty-boy John Lone look.

Rock? What was Rock? Generic. He was just another office boy who plied his trade in hell. And that was it. Fuck, the night was already steeping, almost hotter than the day because the sun was something comfortably disconnected from the actual _warmth_. And the winds bore the bay's writhing sweet aroma deeper inland, coiling up through every street like a wicked perfume, cooling the skin and then simply unceremoniously dying again.

And it became hotter, and hotter, and hotter. Subjectivity's triumph, because it _should_ have been relief, and just wasn't at all. Shenhua wasn't sweating; but when the streetlights' sizzling amber pointillism sprayed from one of the high craning poles, at least he could see that she was enameled with enough makeup to smother an ocean.

“W-what the fuck? C'mon, this's- you goddamn chinks! I'm a goddamn _American_ , y'stupid slant-eyed fuckfaces! You can't do this t'me! I got rights!” Rights? Here? Rock could hear Chang's thugs' shoes clop a funerary tattoo. The bastard's arms were being seized. Strength still strained through him, and it was impotent.

For him, it was a manic animal frenzy, thrashing and heaving and spasming, legs flashing out and fingers clawing because it was the rabbit brought down to ground in its den, but Chang's men weren't even weasels: They were foxes, eyes narrow and pitiless.

_C'mon, you stupid motherfucker. Just stop struggling. It'll be easier for us._

And that was it. No compassion promised, because that didn't dwell in Roanapur. You could find it, but it was a rarefied graft, like citrus in the arctic. And it usually didn't last. It succumbed to the poisoned soil, the venomous climate. Even those that clung to it found their patience being strained. There was a woman Rock knew of. The homeless called her The Queen; definitely _not_ Thai. Some modern Christ ideal. Nursing the poor; bathing the filthy; embracing the wretched.

And she was destined for disappointment. The psychic burnout that he'd begun to understand was the elemental occupational hazard in being a Good Samaritan.

Rock's eyes were bland, flat, staring at the dumbass being dragged off bodily. Their audience had vanished: _This_ was just something everyday. Not a brawl between a pair of 'roided-up retardates and a skinny Japanese suit but just Mister Chang's thugs dragging off someone for something horrible. _That_ , they knew.

They could dream it in exacting detail; they could recite it and anyone with a bit of artistic finesse could paint it from memory. Because the morons had forgotten something fundamental in Roanapur: You were absolutely nothing. Individuals meant only easy targets. Rock wasn't an individual. His ass was stamped with the Lagoon Company; that meant Two Hands Revy and Dutch. The former meant enough pirouetting balletic carnage to fill a mass grave and the latter meant the ineffable whispers of affection between Lagoon and Hotel Moscow.

The threads wound away from that. Revy could slap Eda's back, and then there would be the Ripoff Church. The instant one of Hotel Moscow's lowliest most replaceable interchangeable thugs even broke a nail, then Balalaika's esteem would be impugned, and you'd find yourself and probably your entire family and the guy that sold you a shitty espresso back in 'ninety-one in a hydraulic press.

Unless _you_ had the juice, which meant either a hydrogen bomb or your own crew or a country behind you, then you were _nothing_. You were meat.

“What boring night. That very dull. I thought big muscle men would give more trouble. You feeling okay, Lagoon boy?” That was his name, huh?

“It's Rock-”

“I know Lagoon boy's name. I like _Lagoon boy_ better. Is _cute_.” Should he have been flattered that she knew his name, or pissed off that he was just _boy_? It didn't matter; it was all hypothetical. Force was ultimately the only remedy for impasse or conflict in Roanapur. Even finesse ultimately meant balancing opportunity costs and the allure in effortless but sub-optimal contracts and a violent destructive total victory.

It was just like the business world, really.

Rock didn't know exactly how he felt about _that_ . There was familiarity, ease. Negotiating with Sister Yolanda at the Ripoff Church felt like nothing more than the subdued violence that was _his_ breed of war in Asahi's resource department. It wasn't fists crunching into someone's jaw or the bullet's shrill warble and the gunshot's flat crack that was deeper and duller than he'd ever imagined before coming here. It was intellectual brutality. It was fangs' cold glint and it was mendacity that never quite became _lies_ that could be actionable and it was half-truths and the deception you forced yourself to believe so _they'd_ believe it.

It was wolves in suits still snapping their jaws at each other, but only _bartering_ over lambs.

Revy could just jam her pistol into someone's gut, and that would be it: She'd won. Or she'd lost, and she'd be dead, because it hadn't occurred to her that someone was faster, smarter, had a knife already sliding coldly through her neck.

“Ah, thanks.” Rock's first step was something silent, creeping around the 'roided-up moron that was only rotting meat now. They'd just left him, which was always a possibility, an object lesson that needed no public pillory. Nothing needed to be _said_ ; the semiotics were in the wet festering stink that bloated the meat into a blackened wad straining so tight against its own cold skin that it would burst, smear its purulent juices across the street. The eyes would vanish, pecked from their sockets by the only honest creatures that lived in the city. The wallet was meaningless; that would be filched first, such as there was any real worth in it.

“You no take asshole wallet. Why not? Is there. I no want shit money.” Shenhua's words were saw-toothed. A challenge. “You beat up one asshole, yes?”

“I, ah-”

“You should take wallet. It only go to waste. Why not eat what you kill?” It _plunged_ into his gut like clambering onto an express elevator to the stratosphere.

“What?”

“Yes. You help kill asshole, after all. You fight them. We very grateful. Mistah Chang very grateful to you. Assholes bad stupid men. They beat up Mistah Chang's girls, not want to pay for service. Very stupid. Very bad to do. I think you should take fee for helping Mistah Chang.

“Mistah Chang no like it when people not take his money. It make him feel unappreciated.” Shit. And now there was one of her arms outstretched; the blade was silent, announced with the golden bangles' soft little _chink_ against one another. Revy would've had one of her Cutlasses introducing themselves intimately to the Chinese chick with a sneering _Hands off, chinglish_.

Or maybe not.

Revy would've already been rifling through the dumbass' pockets, dragging out whatever she could, and there would be that cold-eyed flit up to him. _Don't you dare fuckin' give me any lip about this body being something sacred. He's a dead asshole; that's all. And dead assholes don't need their wallets where they're going._

“It make Mistah Chang think he not very important if people say they no want his gen-e-ro-si-ty.” Shenhua always made a point of prolonging those more intricate jumbles of syllables into multiple words. She captured his eyes with a sidelong flit.

“Mister Chang should know by now that I work for the Lagoon Company. I don't need to be paid for getting into street fights like a kid-”

“Mistah Chang insist.” Rock knew what it was. He'd read about it, the way that certain guerrillas, rebels, armies would blood their inductees, would abduct them into service or just _break_ them into submission and they'd be forced to maim and torture and terrorize with that simple binary, live sinful or die pure. And you would always choose life with sin. You'd be a _part_ of them; there would be blood staining your hands, too.

You'd know you were a hypocrite if you said otherwise.

The blade was a soft whisper on his chest.

“Mistah Chang _insist_.”

“All right.” He could turn. And maybe she'd fling one of those vicious daggers through his back. But probably not.

“Is only pocket money, _anyway_. But Mistah Chang like people like you, Lagoon boy. Like people who help him.” Rock _should_ have just shut his mouth while he knelt down and jammed a hand into the bastard's pocket.

This was _his_ fault.

There was a wallet.

“There's no reason to make me do this, you know, Shenhua. This guy- I'm sure he deserved whatever he got, but it was only a coincidence-”

“Oh, I no believe that.” The smile made a brutal plump seam across her face. “You very nice guy, yes?”

“Yeah. I'm a nice guy, Shenhua. I don't start fights.” He really didn't. That was his alibi. He wasn't a brute like Revy; he wasn't even like Dutch, not frothing-at-the-mouth psychotic but something worse, just _easy_ in violence's resort.

The wallet was fat, too.

Bloated with dollars.

“How much moron have?” Rock cracked it open; squinted at the heap of cash. At least a thousand dollars.

“At least a thousand-”

“I ask, _How much moron have?_ I not ask, _At least_.” Shit, this woman.

“Ah, it's...” The bills slid out onto Rock's palm; his thumb paged through them, a heap of hundreds, one, two... Twenties, fifties. “Fifteen-hundred-and-thirty dollars-”

“Dat how much he value his life. How much _you_ value _your_ life, Lagoon boy?”

“I wouldn't put a dollar value on it.”

“You smart boy. Dat right. Stupid man think he keep life _and_ money. Smart man get he can get more money _later_. Now you have stupid man's money. You keep it.” Rock just jammed the greasy wad into a pocket. He had debts, anyway. They were trivial. Room and board at the long-term hotel whose nicest room- a fifteen-by-fifteen cubicle beside Revy's they called a suite- at least had maid service and a shower; fifteen for Dutch when he'd fronted him that for something at the grocery; fifty for his tab at Wong-Su's fruit stand.

And then what?

“Ah-”

“Say, _Thank you, Shenhua_. Say, _Thank you, Mistah Chang_.”

“Uh, yeah. Thanks, Shenhua. And give my thanks to Mister Chang, too.”

“Where you go, Lagoon boy?” And now it was just her bare hand on his chest when Rock finally finally _finally_ caught what he was _so_ sure was an out.

“I'm going back home. I thought I'd take a walk tonight, but that's gone-”

“Oh, it so _early_ , Lagoon boy. You no wanna go to bed _yet_ , right?” There was something more than a little dangerous in her eyes.

And for Shenhua, Revy, any of those werewolf women, _more than a little dangerous_ was juggling chainsaws with live hand grenades swinging from them while you gargled napalm. Rock dragged deep a breath perfumed with her. Orchid wafted from her hair. Blood from her hands. And vanilla, also, from her makeup.

“I, ah-”

“Where slut?”

“She's at the Flag, with Eda.”

“Oh, blonde bitch from Ripoff Church. They big lilies, yes?” It was conspiratorial, a garrulous laughter that wasn't quite a giggle but wasn't exactly _that_ far from it.

“I- I don't know. I guess I never thought about it.” Which was more bullshit than an industrial farm could summon.

“Oh, Lagoon boy get _red_ in the face. You very cute, you know, Lagoon boy?” This was... Well, awkward was having a public colonoscopy. What the hell was this? “Have drink with me.”

“Wha-”

“Have drink with me. What da matter? Lagoon boy no speak English?”

“Yeah, I do, but... I mean, you know, Revy's at the Flag-”

“More than one bar in all of Ro-a-na-pur.” And Shenhua _purred_ those syllables. “Come with me, Lagoon boy. Unless you want to making insulting.”

“I, ah, no. No. I just don't really know the nightlife here.” And for what it was worth, _that_ was actually true. Just like he barely knew anything about Tokyo's. He'd lived there his entire life, and his only sense of it was a misty froth of gaudy pink neon seen through a beer-goggle haze at three in the morning while he staggered around with the jerkoffs _his_ age that he deluded himself were friends and his asshole bosses.

“Oh, Lagoon boy sound so _shy_. Come with Shenhua. Shenhua show you around. Ro-a-na-pur is good town to get drunk in. Everybody sell al-co-hol.” So he was being _dragged_ with her. Or more properly behind her, sliding into her wake, definitely conscious of the hips' roundness in the qipao, their fantastically metronomic sway left and right and left and right.

“Why you walk behind me? Come on, Lagoon boy. People think you bad date, let lady walk ahead of you. You bad date?”

“I- I'm not a bad date, no.” Rock was _terrified_. That was true. This was a woman who regarded rummaging around in someone's gut with a knife like a miniature sword to be a _job_. Not even a charming pastime for when shooting orphans in the face got old. So he was beside her. His shoes clopped with a Clydesdale's gracelessness beside her slippers' languor. Her legs were longer than his; that was obvious. Her gait quick and nimble.

“You so _quiet_. I making nervous?”

“Ah, no, no. I'm just not big on talking-”

“You lying, Lagoon boy. No lie to me.” At least it was still _mirthful_. “I see you talk up _storm_ with Dutch, with slut, with blond boy from Lagoon Company.”

“Ah, well... You know, I guess I just don't know you very well, Shenhua.” And he didn't. And _very well_ was _at all_. She was sexy and Chinese and that was it. She spoke English like some shitty Charlie Chan caricature. And with that high brittle voice that was always inviting a _very_ awkward moment of adjusting himself whenever he heard it.

Was probably also the only woman he'd ever seen, the four-eyed maid excepted, that could actually _challenge_ Revy.

Roanapur was Roanapur. A labyrinth in weird colonial homogeneity, gracefully arcing up to the mountains that dominated the city's skyline more surely than even the few night-splintering ugly international buildings that the crooks comfortably tyrannized. Their flat-faced panels stared down at the poor, the wretched, and they looked up with an ambivalence that could only have been envy and a simple revulsion at the compromises it took to stand _there_ and look down at the city. There was luxury, comfort, but there couldn't have been security, at least not as anyone would have understood it. They had men and women with guns, knives, enough ordnance to challenge the Thai army, but what did that matter?

There'd always be someone tougher, more vicious, hungrier. And they knew it, too. Anyone with Boss Chang's or Balalaika's perspicacity, their finesse and their tact and their ambition, could only know that. The second you were complacent, well, a man like Chin or his pet pirate, Luak? You'd be dead.

Someone would snatch the scepter from your hand and they wouldn't only beat you to death with it but jam it into your ass as their new pennant's flagpole.

Rock could feel some languid melody stir between his ears. It was weird, unplaceable. It had no meaning to him; it was _well_ before his time. Hell, Rock had only been alive for a few years when Gordon Lightfoot smeared that golden sunset despair across the microphone, committed it to an LP.

 _Sundown_.

Rock stared up at the mountains; they were neutral territory, a thickly-forested spine whose pirate hookups and expat neighborhoods crouched away from the city's sun-and-gun psychosis in leafy cool serenity. There was the familiar compact, even there: The slummers stayed in their slums, and the rich pretended they didn't even exist.

“You very quiet, Lagoon boy. Something matter?” Why the _hell_ was she doing this? Or maybe it would've been better to say _inflicting_ this on him.

“It's nothing. Just looking at the mountains.”

“They very nice. Go hiking in mountains a lot. Good exercise.” Was that the only way she saw them? “You go up?”

“No. Never.”

“You no know what you missing. Ah. Here. I like place.” Shenhua's finger stabbed out to her right. _Fragrant Petals Teahouse_.

It was a Triad place. Revy had pointed it out to him with the warning he should only walk into _that_ shithole if he had Boss Chang's protection or if he'd stopped valuing his worthless shitheaded life. There was no need for ostentatious security, because its security was the sure and irresistible wrath that would be visited on _anyone_ who challenged its sanctity. Not that it would stop a bullet.

Rock always marveled at the idiocy in all of it. Because, as conniving as all of the political bullshit was, the truth was that most of them still thought only of the _future_. But the present truth was that anyone with the balls and enough firepower to mow down their sure-to-be-armed patrons could take what they wanted.

Burn it to the fucking ground and what would they do? There were only thoughts of the future. That's what always awed Rock about this place. Because there was no past, whatever its history and the parties' vast intricately knotted heritage; and there was really no future but for what fueled their necessary terrorism.

And there wasn't exactly a present, either. People lived in the borderlands between them, their convergence in past happenstance and the present's hungers and the future's resentments and miseries.

The teahouse was pretty. Even he needed to admit that, and he did ungrudgingly. A soft pink-pearl light spilled from the marquee; a sun-faded awning unfurled like a petulant tongue from beneath that. The door was nestled deep into its tastefully grimy stone façade with a peachy sunset allure.

His hand shot out with a sense of principle, even if Revy had always brushed it away with a guffawing shot at his masculinity.

_What kinda fuck opens a door for a girl? Oh, King Arthur, man, you're really doin' it for me._

Shenhua didn't complain. The smile was just _Shenhua_ 's, an inscrutable vulpine quirk. She _only_ smiled. It was that weird gaudy Oriental caricature, but twisted through enough contortions to awe an Olympic gymnast.

The door slipped open; tea's pungent gunpowder scent and the essence of deeply-fried grease and a homely warmth of steam and stale cigarette smoke and buns and soup and the quintessential Hong Kong elegances slapped at his face. He'd visited Kowloon once or twice. He hated it. He hated being almost everywhere with the Japanese, and _being_ Japanese, because he could _feel_ it stabbing at him.

The animus that animated the eyes. What Dutch had recounted once to him about what it was like to be a Yankee, and a huge _black_ Yankee, stalking in uniform through Vietnam's streets. The locals were like kicked animals, yeah, but only deferential with fear or desire. Rock could unite a room of warring Chinese simply by walking through the door. The smiles that he confronted from shopkeepers and waitresses and waiters and even his fellow businessmen were facile artifice: They only said, _Give me your money, fuck you, and I hope you die._ His bosses and colleagues never noticed it. They ran amok in the cathouses and drank and warbled and even screeched their _tennōheika banzai!_ at about a trillion decibels like they'd landed with the Marines in the 'thirties.

“You very polite, Lagoon boy. Slut not say that.” Shenhua was actually on _speaking_ terms with Revy? Shit. A stage dominated one of the teahouse's extremes, the place cradled in a drowsy red light under hunched wooden rafters. Everything was hardwood; even the booths, nestled with symmetrical perfection along the walls and flanking a center walkway that led off to a low-slung bar. The kitchen belched its fragrances; dark-eyed women, lavish and long-legged and shapely and obviously _owned_ , slathered with the Triad's proprietary stamps, stalked around on high high heels and with camp-sexy costumes like Shenhua's.

But Shenhua didn't _wear_ her qipao like a costume. It was hers. Scraping basal Triad wannabes were their waiters; they were strapped, and pretty ostentatiously, thick flat-faced bulges through grimy aprons draped over suited silhouettes like throngs of servile penguins.

“Uh, I've never been here before, Shenhua-”

“Of course you never come before. People no come in unless they Chinese or with Chinese person. I Taiwanese. But is close enough. Place look like Hong Kong. You been to Hong Kong, Mister Japanese man?” So, she knew he was Japanese? Was that cause for _terror_? She'd turned, tormented him with that cryptic smile again.

“I, ah, I've been there a few times. Yeah. On business.”

“Speak Chinese?”

“Which Chinese?” Her laughter crept up through his ears like an invading army.

“You smart man. I talk about _Cantonese_. You speak?”

“Not well. No.”

“I speak Taiwanese. Mandarin. Not Cantonese. Sound like monkey talk to me, but is okay. What you speak?”

“Really terrible Cantonese and Mandarin. A few words of Shanghainese.”

“Then we good. We keep speak English. Here. Have seat.” It was uncomfortably close to the empty stage. Rock could already see it.

He'd be the night's entertainment. Dragged onto it and probably bent over a chair and _charitably_ just literally and not metaphorically fucked.

Scarlet Naugahyde groaned under his ass; Shenhua made a point of sitting opposite him, at least, with a broad scuffed wooden slab separating them. It was still _uncomfortably_ near. She was beautiful. This wasn't a date.

This was _not_ a date.

Just an evening with an absolutely dazzling Dragon Lady.

Fuck.

What did she want from him, anyway?

One of the waiters had already sidled up with a groveling invitation to abuse or adoration. The vicissitudes meant nothing, so long as there could be even the tiniest kernel of attention. He just stood. No _What would you like?_ , because that would definitely not be decorous.

“You order. You like Chinese?” He certainly did. And the food, too.

“Uh, well... Maybe...” What the _hell_ would he for them? “Ah-”

“You so funny!” And now there was laughter pouring from her lips, reducing her eyes to squinting little slits. “I no let you order. They not listen to cute little Japanese boy. We have usual. Make fast.” Chop-chop. Shenhua didn't accord the faceless goon even a glance.

And that was his lot, wasn't it? Invisibility. A sharp twinge of empathy for the bastard.

And there was another painfully protracted silence that she either just tolerated or didn't even notice. Tea was delivered, immaculate china cups and a battered steel pot. It _was_ Hong Kong. Men in other booths, and a few women, quarreled in loud and candid Cantonese; a few sat in sullen hunched repose, brushing their fingers along teacups' rims or just lingering with chopsticks snapped in quick strokes at bits of dim sum.

It was beautiful. Rock needed to admit that. The smoke didn't ruin it, either, just subdued _enough_ that it couldn't really compete with the tea's and meals' aromas.

“You nervous, Lagoon boy. Why you so nervous? You been in worse place before. When we pull you out of jungle, they about to cut your balls off. Remembah?”

Oh, he remembered.

“Yeah. I guess-”

“You seemed strong enough then. What the matter?”

“I don't do very well with _this_ kind of thing, I guess.” And it was true. His life was a mosaic of crises to be resolved. But who the hell was he?

He...

He was an adequate A student; he finished in the uppermost twentieth percentile on his exams. He spoke a few languages with a sure confidence, and more than that with varying measures of mortifying ineptitude. His few girlfriends and that one sojourn into a boy's arms had told him that he was good- _enough_ -looking. But they'd left him.

Because he had his responsibilities. One of those was twenty-four-hour days; was kissing ass 'til his lips were numb; was not even being _himself_. He hadn't lived. That was it. His entire childhood, his adulthood, they were strange out-of-body experiences. Dissociation.

Everyone lived in a place called dissociation in Japan, though, unless they had the luxury to assert themselves as _themselves_ . And unless you were one of the few rarefied ones to be born into money, that meant poverty, alienation from everyone and everything. The celebrities, writers, filmmakers? Please, motherfucker. _They_ hewed as closely to the archetypes as everyone else. Theirs were prepackaged acts of rebellion, parceled out at the appropriate moment to _seem_ outrageous.

Rock knew what outrage was now. He was living it.

“What thing this?”

“Living. I'm a problem-solver.” That was the truth, wasn't it? He was a machine; a goddamn drone they'd drag out when they needed something done, as surely utilitarian as a calculator.

“So am I.”

“No- I mean... How do I say this, Shenhua? I don't wanna bore you, or be too...” Was it being forward to utter the most achingly superficial little missive? “Too forward, I guess, but what I mean is that _that's all I do_. I solve people's problems.

“I'm just... It's kind of like learning how to walk, coming here.” The tea was bitter; bitterer than Rock was accustomed to. But it wasn't green; wasn't the _sencha_ that the office inflicted on its clients according to ritual.

Gunpowder, hot and intense on his tongue.

“Roanapur's another place entirely from Tokyo. You, ah, ever been to Tokyo?”

“No. Never Tokyo. No like Japanese.” There was no equivocation, no polite politically-correct remark about _present company excluded_. “Japanese terrible people. Wish they all die.”

“Yeah. So I do sometimes.” She was laughing, at least.

“You do?”

“Yeah. I hate the Japanese. I hate my country. I thought I'd miss it, honestly. Roanapur's so different.” Rock's fingers had twisted together, a convoluted knot of flesh that was a perfect straight seam beside the one settling like a heap of breeding vipers in his gut. “I guess... I don't know what it is.

“Japan's such a settled place. You don't just know _who_ you are in Japan; someone already decided who you were, who you're gonna be, who you'll _always_ be before you're born. And you can move from Sapporo to Kagoshima, and you'll always be in the same country.

“In Roanapur, you can walk a block and be somewhere you've never been before.”

“Is different. Ro-a-na-pur.” Was that agreement?

“You're from Taiwan. What about that? Taipei?”

“Taiwan only Taipei. Is okay. Is big city.”

“Yeah. I've been there.”

“Yes. Is very big. Is very boring. Crime okay there, but most people, they keep head down, eyes _straight_ ahead. Like you say about Japan.” Only someone like Shenhua could assemble a sentence like _that_. Crime okay?

You usually _complained_ about crime. For her, though, it wasn't only the melodramatic gorehound's enthusiasm for bedlam. It was a job. It was an ambiance.

“Worst, though-”

“Singapore, right?” They both laughed at that. Because even the most achingly _bland_ mentality would still appreciate how stultifying that charming little fascist Utopia was. It was beautiful, clean, absolutely _safe_.

And as exhilarating as an evening staring at growing grass.

Sometimes he craved grass. But those desires still needed to be incubated in some kind of upheaval. Singapore fucking denied its simple possibility anywhere, at any time.

“Yes, Singapore _terrible_. Hate Singapore. Is very pretty. Problem is too many Chinese. Not, ah, _Singapore_ Chinese. Mainland Chinese. Rich and crooked and gaudy.”

“Yeah. I've heard that.” It was microscopically small talk. Rock knew it. But this was _Boss Chang_ 's enforcer. It would be infinitesimal unless she _ordered_ something profound. No liquor. Fuck, no. “I, ah, I have a friend who lives in Singapore now-”

“You always so boring, Lagoon boy? You act like I eat you.” _Her_ fingers, achingly long and fine, they were laced together, lording over the table, elbows planted on the thick hardwood slab. Nails coiled rich like a phalanx of cardinals' tails over her soft white skin.

“I- I'm sorry. I guess... I don't know you at all, Shenhua. I don't even know your family name.”

“Is okay. I no have one.” It was bullshit. Right?

“You don't have a family name?”

“Who have family name when no have family? Right? You have family name?”

“Okajima.”

“How it written?” Shit, that obsession.

“Uh, hill and island. It's- it's a pretty boring name.”

“Yes. Is boring. All Japanese name so _boring_. How that happen? You Japanese, you fuck up all Asia, and then you become accountant. How that work?”

“I dunno.” It was his family's shame, of course. Those that were quietly peeled out of the registry. Those whose lives were stained with the Pacific War's ugliness. They _did_ fuck up Asia, and at least the fuckface ultranationalist that beat him up in college because he wouldn't wish the emperor ten thousand years _admitted_ what had happened, whatever the pride.

“You afraid of me, Lagoon boy. That true. You afraid of me.”

“Shit, yes.” That was evidently _some_ breed of magic, because her smile was fucking _brilliant_. It was effulgent. “I'm scared of you; of course I'm scared of you.”

“Why dat?”

“Because you kill people-”

“Two Hand kill many people, too. You scared of her?”

“Yeah.” And it was true. Rock _was_. They might have had that comfortable sense of allegiance to numb the unease, but it was still pretty much cohabiting or at least _working_ with a well-fed tiger. You could never be sure when it would just snap its jaws around your neck _because_.

“You okay with scared?”

“I guess so. It's something you just get used to. Like this city. Revy scared the hell out of me the first time I met her. And then I started thinking she wasn't _really_ that bad. Just misunderstood.”

Or was _this_ why Shenhua suggested this weird little date? Plumb him for...

No.

It was already obvious how stupid _that_ was. If she'd wanted to know anything, she would've just snatched him from the street. Because Rock would talk. It wasn't disloyalty: It was realism. It wasn't torture in its hot urgency so much as the prolonged distress that would break someone. And no one would intervene. Not for Rock.

Lagoon may have been a precious independent, an almost irreplaceable intermediary, but Dutch wouldn't call in his markers with Chang for him. And Balalaika wouldn't brook a war for some dumb Japanese businessman too far from home.

“Oh?” The Dragon Lady's brows were fine, thin, flawlessly trimmed and manicured and narrowed to sharply-defined stripes.

“And then I think that she's really _not_ misunderstood at all. And she doesn't care if anybody thinks there's more to her than there really is.”

“Slut just bad girl. Like bitch from Ripoff Church. Like everybody else live in Ro-a-na-pur.” Did that include him? “You think too much, Lagoon boy. You think too much like that, somebody going to kill you when you least expecting it.”

“That almost happened tonight. I was lost in thought and I ran into that jerkoff.” Wasn't that pious?

A dead man.

But, fuck, he was _dead_. What did it matter if he called him a saint or a donkey-raping catamite?

“See? It better not too think too much.” Rock could _really_ hear it now.

 _Sundown_.

Revy would be pissed with him. They had... It wasn't a relationship; not exactly. It was maybe some kernel of mutual familiarity, like having befriended a wolf. If you tested those boundaries and it wasn't in the mood, you'd have your arm snapped off at the shoulder.

Was there affection?

Desire? Revy was gorgeous; that was obvious. A quirk of a smile and probably everyone in Roanapur she hadn't pissed off _beyond_ getting hard or sopping for her would roll over like a puppy.

So was Eda.

And then there was Shenhua.

But was it proprietariness for him? Just someone that belonged to you not because you had any interest in _having_ them but only for owning them? Was it because he was still her hostage? There weren't shackles then; there wasn't even the simple _violence_ she promised. It was the knowledge that she'd ripped him from that secure certain spiritual nihil. He was obliged to her, right?

“You get faraway look in eye. Make you looking like moron.”

“'cause I am, Shenhua.” Fuck, it was true. He needed to be an irredeemable idiot. An _irremediable_ one, right?

“Oh, is good when men telling truth.” She sure as hell wasn't arguing with him. A stooping waiter, maybe the one that'd heard her quick command, was scraping and groveling to the table now. Stout china clattered; steam blasted up its rich and delirious aromas into his nostrils.

It set into relief just how fucking _famished_ Rock actually was. It'd been... Twenty hours since he'd choked down _something_ barely memorable enough to be forgotten, subsisting on cigarettes and coffee and the simple will, the _obligation_ , to satisfy Dutch. To be meaningful. And now buns wafted their pungent steam and noodles coiled around jumbled vegetables and seafood with a succulent wok hei and jiugui sat with a heavy _crack_ on the table with a pair of glasses and absolutely no water or ice.

“Is very good, yes?”

“Yeah.” No remark on exactly how the _hell_ she could eat like _that_ and preserve that physique. Exercise. And probably Revy's metabolism. There was enough at the table for probably five. And it was obvious why in about five seconds.

Shenhua ate without any real restraint; no separate family-style platters or bowls, and only her chopsticks dipping into the meal's luscious morsels.

“What? I no have bad disease. You eat. You have bad disease?”

“Uh, no-”

“Then eat, stupid man. Don't be dumb. You look like hungry, yes?”

“Yeah. I- I am.” So Rock ate. And ate. Slowly, but with an earnestness he hadn't felt for days. It wasn't that he hated being with the Lagoon company; it was the simple homogeneity in the almost utilitarian _shit_ from the same restaurants. The crap pizza that Revy always insisted on ordering, or the prosaic takeout.

There was Thai, yeah, but that usually had the expectation that you actually sat at a restaurant. Revy was sometimes like a five-year-old, bitching whenever he took even a _second_ too long; she wolfed down meals, deft and impatient and martial, rarely even bothering to linger on _anything_. It was obvious why.

It wasn't only _one_ meal that'd been interrupted with Benny's urgent bellowing from the throbbing smoke-belching Plymouth's window about a job or Dutch needing them at the office _immediately_ or even a bullet's sullen sigh and firepower's thunder splintering any real hope of a calm fucking dinner for _once_. Even when there wasn't that, there was just Revy's agitation, one long leg thrown over another, knee wriggling, jostling at the table, rattling the silver or almost hurling his chopsticks from their plate.

And he'd finish; that was it. Or it would be a quiet meal with the Company, and it _could_ almost be charming, the chortling bullshit and Revy not roaring at him to just fucking finish, goddammit, what, you want the waiter to come by an' refresh your wine, asshole?, but animating it with that manic energy that sometimes, _sometimes_ , in those rarefied intervals in great elliptical convolutions of booze and gunpowder and adrenaline and blood and death and tranquility and reward and every _other_ twist, would just be _charm_. Because she was charming.

Coarse, fuck, of course; everyone here was hardened, callused. Even Sister Yolanda's urbanity, well, that wasn't quite camouflage, but it was velvet draped on stone gathered around velvet. Everyone petrified here; everyone grew fangs. A city of werewolves, ultimately, to a lesser or greater measure.

Rock knew his was definitely _lesser_. But he'd seen it. There were still the pangs, but that was all they were. Just like in Japan. Misanthropy's perfect industrial orderliness. It was supposed to be resurrection; not to be a bleeding-heart ministering to the poor and the huddled and snuggling the lepers, but he wasn't supposed to be so ostentatiously _busy_ , so goddamnably narcissistically invested in his own trivial obsessions that he couldn't _think_ , legitimately _think_ , about others. Not toss a few yen at one of the unwashed dudes and their rangy half-feral street dogs that he resented, fuck, _resented_ because they could afford a dog. It was status' ideal: You only had a dog if you were a billionaire or homeless.

Perfect duality. Either the top or the bottom, but his friends made a point of ushering the girlfriends with the put-on giggling as artificial as the faces they painted on with budget-shattering Korean makeup to pet shops with their _dream-fun-time dog rental_ services. You'd cradle a puppy on your lap in some feathery fantasy room and they'd grovel and stoop and tea about thirty fucking _times_ what it cost them to brew would be set before you and you'd be a king, one of the corporate titans, ah, another pastry! Why not! All of it's fake, anyway! All of it's credit or with money that pours like water through dead fingers from your cards.

Rock had wanted a dog. He didn't even _like_ dogs; it wasn't that he disliked them, either, but he'd never even known one. He'd never _petted_ a dog. But he needed one. Because Kageyama- _buchō_ had a dog, a satiny golden that had pride of place in his gardens of family photography. Because any pauper could shit out a kid, but having a _dog_ was real distinction.

Rock didn't care about having a dog anymore. He'd petted more than a few in Roanapur, the merchants with their gimlet-eyed pups that seemed more wolf than dog, or at least suggested heedless street breeding with savage blood. He liked them. He'd even been bitten once or twice, felt flesh become blood under their snapping jaws, been serenaded with Revy's laughter.

_Hah! Looks like this one's got good instincts, Rock. Dogs always like eating shit._

The meal was almost completely silent. Rock picked through the noodles while Shenhua, well, the word was _fed_. Quick, snapping strokes with chopsticks cradled in fingers that had obviously been graced with what Rock recognized from the office ladies as a weekly manicure. If not daily.

“Is good you no talk when eating. Men who talk _annoying_.” She wasn't finished; she'd just set down the lissome stalks in dark lacquered wood onto their porcelain rests. “But I not finish yet. Office man should drink with me.

“Yes?”

“Yes. I- I'll pour, if you'd like.” That was Rock's contribution in college. Even a few high school mixers when the brats sneaked in a bit of sake or even something legitimately _hard_ from their parents' 'sixties wet bars with fictions of transgression. He poured.

He smiled that vacuous rictus smile like the dead men he'd seen with bloated meat twisting their skin into weird frozen leers that were almost joy, almost the essence of finally having heard the Reaper's joke, the wisdom that would free anyone from those insane fictions they called sanity and just let them _laugh_. He poured. Always. Murmured a few formulaic missives at the girls whose eyes and legs and fine fingers and soft skin and round hips enchanted him. But it never mattered. He never really _spoke_ the mechanical vernacular. There was something he just didn't _get_.

He'd gotten laid. Finally. But it was awkward and anxious and she was one of the girls that had always stood like Rock at those circles' periphery. But hers was forever staring _in_ , aspiring to their approval; the gofer and the hanger-on and the cruelest was that, obviously, she was the prettiest. Half-Korean, huge lignite eyes and creamy skin and an enchanting roundness in _everything_ , tall and alluring. She wouldn't accord him even a glance while they groped through it.

“Why office man in Ro-a-na-pur? Office man look like he _hate_ being here.”

“I don't hate it.” It wasn't untrue; wasn't exactly true, either. The jiugui was cheap, cracked open with its simple screw-lid's quick twist. It burbled out, a greasy diamond puddle in the glasses. The oily waters captured the place's dim sulfurous light, sucking down and spitting up every mote in twinkling little ripples. “It's not that I hate Roanapur.”

“Is different from home?”

“Well, there's that. But I like that. Why? Do you hate Roanapur?”

“Is work.” Ain't that the truth? “Is different. Yes.” Shenhua, fuck, was she as awkward as _he_ was? Regretting the invitation? “How different for office boy?”

“Because...” How _was_ it? “Because I don't know what the day will bring, I guess.”

“Sound better.”

“Maybe. I hated my old predictable life back in Tokyo. But I could also just get killed any day here. When I signed on with the Lagoon Company, I mean, it's not like I had any naïve illusions. They took pity on me, picked _me_ up when I was just a liability. My old company sent a mercenary company to kill me.

“No. It wasn't even to kill _me_. It was to take back or destroy just a little compact disc I had.” She was laughing. And _he_ was, too. And it was the same damn laughter. Razored and cynical and just _savage_. Because that was the truth. Who the fuck cared about the man? It was what was meaningful to _others_ ; not to you.

People died because they were an inconvenience, or because it was gratifying to kill them, or they _needed_ to die. Mostly? It was just incidental. Like the Americans or Russians or Israelis or British or French or anyone else. They were just coincidentally _there_ when a bomb needed to be dropped.

“But Lagoon boy alive.”

“Yeah. I'm alive. I think it's just luck, honestly. I've almost been shot so many times.”

“Hurt to get shot. Believe me.” Shenhua was sipping her jiugui slowly, deliberately. Fine threads vanished between her lips. She didn't just _inhale_ it like Revy. Drunkenness wasn't the desire, and definitely wasn't the destination she sprinted to with rocket-propelled ethanol fanaticism.

“Yeah, I think it would. You've been shot?”

“Oh, many time. It occupational ha-zard. Is okay. Most of time, bullet go in, come out. Good doctor can just make it like it never happen.”

“Wow. That's...”

“Sometime, bullet not come out. Doctor need to dig around if it too close to organs, or leave it in. I have three bullet.”

“Three bullets?” The smile that answered him was sly, sidelong, something _achingly_ mischievous.

“Yes. Three bullet. They hurt very much. But it is good learning.” Rock knew _that_. He'd never been shot, but _almost_ being shot was near enough.

But how educational really _was it_ when he still stood on the deck with Revy while she hefted an RPG's thick wood-paneled tube on her shoulder and belched out extreme prejudice at any motherfucker that upset her or gave her an answer more equivocal than some reflexive pants-shitting, _Yes! We surrender!_?

“What did _you_ learn, Shenhua?”

“Not to stand in front of gun. Of course, stupid man.”

“Oh. That simple, huh?”

“All thing in life simple. Dumb people make complicated to make feel better.” Maybe that was true. “You drinking now.” _That_ was Revy. Filtered through a Charlie Chan movie, maybe.

“Sorry.” He drank. And drank. The jiugui was a jumble of battery acid and earwax, but that was jiugui; that was really _any_ booze. He'd hardened his tongue to the rum that Revy drank like a real goddamn pirate, but he hadn't had _this_ for awhile. It was already hitting him, even with the meal.

Probably because he finished a full glass in one gasp.

It wasn't that the universe swam like staring into a pool churned with its intruders' slow lazy splash. There was a tremor like autokinesis tugging at his eyes, twisting the fixtures' soft taper-light into quivering candles.

He poured another glass for himself.

“I don't want to complain, Shenhua. No one likes listening to somebody else bitch. But... I don't know anything about you. _You're_ not complaining.”

“Why should I complaining? Is good here. Much money made. Good food. Is sun. Not too much smoke and pollution. No smog. Pretty people.” All of this was true.

And it was the painted grace adorning a corpse. It was a necropolis; it was a dead land populated by those that were just shuffling in lock-step from the twilight and into the darkness. They were all chained to each other, even if some felt the shackles heavier than others.

“You unhappy, Lagoon boy?”

“You can call me _Rock_ , you know.”

“You not like Lagoon boy? I think is good. You are boy from Lagoon Company.”

“You know Revy pretty well, right, Shenhua?”

“No. I no know slut at all. Like slut no know me.” It was just... So simple. It was stupid, anyway. Those pangs, those _yearnings_ , shit, authentic yearnings, to tease out some tiny kernel of understanding of who and- and _what_ Revy really was.

The misunderstood little girl still wailing from a brutish sneering beautiful miscreant's body, or just a thug? And did it matter? Would that understanding of things _past_ mean anything for him? For them?

“Why you ask about slut?”

“I- I don't know. I work with her-”

“So ask slut. Not me. Is bad manners to asking girl about other girl, Lagoon boy.” She had him there. Rock could feel it quirking his lips. It was stupid; it _eclipsed_ stupid; stupid was a few light years behind whatever distant galaxy of idiocy he'd trespassed now. Because he could feel some inane heady smile flitting over his lips.

Fingers tangled around his glass. It must have been his third. He thought. Was it his fourth, maybe? The world had melted down into a fluid constellation of _happenings_. There was causality. He was reasonably sure, anyway. Things happened and then _other_ things happened.

Other things followed those. And... And he was sure that other things still followed _those_.

And Shenhua was absolutely resplendent. She exuded the negative light that poured from Revy, from Eda, from... Even from that psychotic maid. The maid was _built_ ; even with the dainty costume, clearly more incredibly than even _Revy_ , whose body was something he'd come to identify alone with the long-legged surgically-perfected nipped-and-tucked elegances whose siren songs poured through Kabukichō's streets immaculate in their concrete and their pavement and squalid with human hungers.

He'd noticed. Of course he'd noticed. Terror couldn't subdue _that_ fundamentally human instinct. Shapely legs cradled in creamy stockings that bit into thighs that somehow could hurl her along like a tigress and still had the softness to taste the hems' faint _bite_. A vast prow blasting through her costume.

“Oh, _fuck_ , I think I'm drunk.” Rock wasn't exactly lamenting it; more just a statement of fact, half-slumped, his upturned palm like some meat-plinth for a chin. His smile was a moron's.

“You _think_ you drunk? I _know_ Lagoon boy drunk.” Oh, he was. Hellaciously. “Is okay. I getting drunk _too_.” Just a bit; Shenhua's fingers were still more than a little unsteady, vacillating between just a _micron_ from each other and about an inch. “Maybe more. Is _strong_ jiugui.”

“T-tell me about it. It feels like gasoline.”

“May be. Always order cheap jiugui. In China, is gasoline a _lot_. Chinese disgusting people. Everybody disgusting person, though. I go all over. Everybody disgusting. Japanese shit. Chinese shit. Taiwanese _shit_. So are Thai and Viet-na-mese. Everybody.”

“Know anyone who's not shit?” Shenhua seemed _sincerely_ to be churning that one through gears that the liquor had rusted more than a little. “Uh-”

“Shh, _shh_. I am thinking now. I no think so.”

“You think I'm shit?”

“Mmm. Of course, Lagoon boy. You big shit. You big fuck-up. Slut say you always get taken; no take care of yourself. You no _kill_. Lagoon boy could have killed stupid steroid men, but he did not. Why you no carry gun?

“Why you no carry around knife? You big loser.” Well, wasn't that a referendum on his masculinity? “But that okay. I think is cute. Helpless men like little puppies.”

“Don't Chinese people eat dogs?” It was a bullshit comment. Rock was already wishing that words had some convenient tether that would let them be dragged back into your mouth unheard. They didn't.

“That what make Lagoon boy so _cute_.” Was that her foot? A satiny little whisper against his ankle. His socks had slipped down; he _definitely_ felt the strange slipper's texture. It wasn't a jolt; she probably didn't expect that, either, when the smile spread like poisoned treacle over lush red lips. This was probably not good. Because it wasn't just some incidental stroke. She did it again.

And again.

And now it was creeping up, just to efface _any_ ambiguity from his imagination.

“Ah, Shenhua-”

“How dumb is Lagoon boy?”

“Pretty goddamned stupid if I-”

“If you _what_ , stupid boy?” Creeping up, and up, and up; drifting past his knee and just _rising_. Her legs were impossibly long. They'd probably stab _through_ his gut if she jabbed them out to their fullest.

Or something else.

“If I think... Think what's happening is what I think is happening.”

“What stupid boy think happen?” Craning over the table. Her hair was still fettered in its thick knot at her back, and still enough of it was artfully loosed to cradle her cheeks.

“I think you're, ah...” _Missus Robinson, are you trying..._ It was ridiculous. This needed to be, well, _something_. Something.

“Yes, stupid man? You know, I tell you, thinking too much make you _idiot_.” Shenhua's voice was still kissed with those high brittle notes, but it had fallen. Huskier, softer, it definitely wasn't Revy's, but it hit him _deeply_.

“I think you're trying to get me to do something stupid.”

“You think it stupid?” The smile wasn't just _sly_. Sly was something people said when they didn't really have the words to capture that kind of guile.

“I think _you_ think I'm an idiot. I think you're doing this to make me look like even more of a moron. And you'd be right.”

“What that mean, Lagoon boy?” Shit! It wasn't just on his knee now; the slipper was now tracing along other topographies. Slowly, a sensual presence, something numb and neutral and still so fucking _hot_ just with the inferno that was bubbling in his trousers.

“Uh, well...” This wasn't really possible, was it? Why? And why not? Well, wasn't it fucking obvious? Rock was...

Was Rock.

He was just middle-management. He didn't _contribute_ anything. He wasn't Boss Chang. Wasn't Dutch. Wasn't Revy. Wasn't even Benny. What the fuck did he do but the paperwork and the logistical work for the _Lagoon_? It wasn't even self-loathing that spoke then. It was just realism. He and Shenhua lay not only countries and languages but universes apart.

“I think you're trying to fuck me, Shenhua.”

“Lagoon boy not as dumb as he look.”

“Why?”

“Nevah mind.” That smile. That _laughter_. An ankle's twist and it was ground closer, and closer, and closer. He felt it. A lurching sharp spasm. “You _very_ dumb. You think girl just there for boy when _he_ want her?”

“That's not what I meant.” It wasn't at all. It was more than girl shouldn't give a shit about boy who's just...

Rock.

“What you mean, Lagoon boy?” She was so achingly _sweet_ , palms cradling her chin, fingers fanned languidly over cheeks that betrayed _nothing_ at all. If anyone had seen her smile, also, her entire face, what would they have thought?

Nothing. She was just being the beautiful woman she was. Maybe a little playful. So goddamn _casual_. And her heel rose up, fell down, again and again and again.

“I think you're beautiful, Shenhua. I don't know why you'd even be interested in me. I'm boring. I'm not a killer. I'm not tough. I'm not anything you are. I'm amazed you'd even notice me.”

“You good-looking. You _sweet_.” What the hell was this? Would Revy ever have said _that_? “Not every girl look for boy like ev-ry-body else.” Maybe. “You book-smart, too. Not like most people Ro-a-na-pur.” That was true.

He guessed it was true, anyway.

“Come back with me my place, Lagoon boy.” He shouldn't. He _really_ shouldn't. “It very close by. I have many place in ci-ty.” It was...

Well, it was close by.

He was.

“You going mess up your pants, Lagoon boy?”

“I think so.”

“Good.” _Shit_. It was a wince. The heel ground with earnest zest against him now. He should get up. Should just spring away from the table, tell the Dragon Lady that- that she could do whatever the fuck she wanted with him, but he wouldn't...

What?

“You come now, Lagoon boy.” And she clearly wasn't making much of an effort to stand. It was bubbling up; the words were enough, white-hot psychosis kneaded into every nerve like acid. He didn't want it to stop. That was the problem. It was about honesty, right?

Wasn't that what this place was supposed to be? And here he was, parroting the same damn dishonest bullshit. He liked Shenhua. Nothing about her soul but what the fuck did that mean? His was growing tattered and threadbare in this place. Not every bit of cargo they trafficked was as innocuous as bootleg Playstations and tax-free cigarettes and booze and drugs.

They'd carted off a thousand Kalashnikov rifles from the Vietnamese only a few days before that; traded them for five hundred pounds of heroin. The Kalashnikovs were destined to Angola; they already had a buyer lined up, a hundred dollars-a-rifle.

It was a vast score; pure profit but for the avgas and their time. They'd jacked the heroin off of some miserable bastard who didn't have the juice to complain to anyone. And Rock knew what would happen to him. Revy was roaring with laughter over it. He'd fucked them over in that distant misty abstraction called the past when Rock knew absolutely nothing but the video arcade and the batting cage and groveling to his bosses.

And the cartel he was in hock to wouldn't give a damn _who'd_ jacked the heroin from him, because that wasn't their problem. What _was_ their problem was that he owed them whatever it was worth. They always fronted loads now, because it poured like meltwater from mountain springs in the golden triangle and Colombia and Mexico and Sicily. But if you lost a load and couldn't make it up, that was it.

Revy was wailing when they'd stumped back to the Flag. Three hours, and they were a hundred thousand dollars richer, minus expenses. Dutch offered to pay for an all-nighter. It was a wicked bender, and Revy couldn't stop giggling over what he'd do. It'd become a drinking game. She'd finish a shot, and then there'd be another layer of anguish.

They'd peel off his eyelids, and make him watch _Geraldo_.

They'd tear off his fingernails, and make him play the piano.

They'd snip off _one_ ball, and then put him on a balance beam.

When Rock hit his sixth shot, _he_ was giggling.

When he stumbled through his eighth, not even feeling its inferno sliding down, he was chortling with Revy, too. At the tenth, he was volunteering something.

Cut open his ears, and make him listen to a Yanni album on _repeat_.

She thought that was lame, dumbass, but nice try, at least.

She laughed. It made him _desperately_ hard, even with the liquor slackening everything. Even more when her breast grazed his shoulder; when she craned over the barstool and jammed a finger into his chest and he could feel her breath waft on his face.

So what the fuck did _he_ have to pretend about innocence?

He was surrendering. He surrendered, because whether you gave up one soldier at once, or a whole army, surrender was surrender. It was something ineluctable. He loved that word. Eyes trembled; lashes beat a deft tattoo on his cheeks. It was flaring up. He'd never had _that_. A woman's shoe ground against him through his pants.

A coarse tread like- like some movie _kunoichi_ 's slipper. Her foot's shape was something almost incredible, coiling around him.

“You pretty big for Japanese boy. Chinese girl very _small_.” Was she? Shit. Shit. And it just hit him.

Lightning. Skewering everything.

A grunt like some brain-damaged boar bitten back. The will, the _wish_ , it was to roar. Just howl and heave and let it pour from his mouth. The lamentation and the pure perfect delectation in it. Because he wasn't just _coming_. Going. He was there. It was here. Every sense crammed down into that idiot jumble of basal nerves. White-hot inferno behind his eyes. Throbbing and pulsating up and it burbled, smeared itself like grease and cream over him, across his shorts.

“S-shit...” Wheezing.

“Oh, Lagoon boy have _fun_ , yes?”

“Yes. Yes-”

“Go back my place now.” Surrender, right? Surrender. Clearly, no one paid at the teahouse; it wasn't a business. He was being dragged away from the table, wrenched to unsteady feet. It would've been so _beautiful_ had her room, her place, whatever, been tethered to the teahouse. It wasn't.

The night had set now, curdled thick and abysmal like lurking on the ocean's floor, staring up through the soft sallow moonlight that stole through writhing wavelets. He slunk through it with her. Staggering behind Shenhua, her bangles a quiet little chime, fingers laced around his wrists like a petulant child. Maybe he was. He wanted it.

He was reasonably sure. Something sure as hell did. Pulled along the streets, wreathed with a fevered sense that was more levitation. Roanapur was always a dreamtime, anyway, but this was a dream within a dream within a dream. It couldn't have _been_ possible.

And it was.

She hadn't chosen one of Boss Chang's vulgar towers that said more about a Chinese man's overcompensation for real or imagined defects than any real enthusiasm for security. It wasn't Revy's and his hotel-tenement, either. A bungalow tucked into one of the city's districts he was sure he'd seen racing past as a muddled jumble through the Plymouth's window, and that was essentially it. It wasn't beautiful; wasn't ugly. And it wasn't locked.

Because that was the city's essential character. Whatever someone wanted, they'd take. He still locked his door, even with the knowledge that anyone who seriously didn't give even a quarter of a shit about Two Hands' ferocity would just hammer down the heavy wooden panel. Or there would be the shotgun's heavy _crack_ and the knob and frame would just vanish.

She stole in quietly, a ghost, or maybe something more like cancer. It was her home, after all. Another wicked intrusion.

His shoes slipped off with muscle memory; she said nothing. They were both Asian, weren't they? It was beautiful. Spare and still assembled with a fine sense of feng shui. Dark and brooding hardwood melted into murky silhouettes that were furniture. Rock's eyes barely registered them in the red-staining mist like Shanghainese cooking that poured out of a few fixtures when Shenhua's fingers snapped at a switch.

“You have a beautiful apartment-”

“You really wanting talk about furniture, office boy?” Not especially.

“Sorry-”

“You skip smalltalk. It stupid; give me headache. You want more to drink, or it give you Mister Softy?” Shit.

Liquid courage, or _would_ it just kill _that_?

“I- I'm all right, really-”

“Good.” There wasn't even the time to appreciate the sitting room; nothing beyond just a creamy sofa and a chair. A quick dart heaved them through an almost perfunctory hall. There was a bathroom; Rock caught a glimpse of a toilet standing alone and proud beside a Japanese-style shower... Did the Chinese have that, too?

He didn't even know. All the hotels he'd seen in Hong Kong and Shanghai were just western.

Her bedroom.

This was one of Shenhua's bedrooms.

He was an idiot.

She should leave.

The door was clattering closed behind him. Her hand was a magician's grace, animating a fan that was something compulsory for every room in every apartment and every home and every hotel in the city. It was just colonial chic, heavy wood or plastic or _something_ with ungainly limbs outstretched. Hers traced a languid rattle, spoke with its motor's soft whine. The bed was better measured in acreages; nothing at all like his.

“You have disease, Lagoon boy? Answer me truth-fully, or I track you down an' make sure you never die. Girls in Ro-a-na-pur, many have nasty disease.”

“I... No, I don't.” He hadn't even gotten _laid_ once in Roanapur. He hadn't even been kissed. Hadn't done _anything_. “I don't have anything, Shenhua.”

“That good. I don't, either. I very selective. I think you very cute. Most boy, I make wear. Not you. I have good feeling about Lagoon boy. Sit down.” It was an exercise in legendary courage that he didn't just flop onto his ass on the huge carpet that sprawled out like a scarlet beach around her bed.

It was incredible. Lushly curtained in silk; a four-poster extravagance whose canopy had been torn away or just didn't exist. Blood-red drapery hedged it, drooped like lurid pennants from its stalks. The bedding was a hue deeper, burgundy that shone wetly under the light that poured out from lamps she twisted into smearing gold beacons.

Everything shone. Jewelry announced itself on a heavy vanity; a bed stand was crammed with enough sexual indulgences to satisfy a colony of women, much less one. She had clothing, too, with a closet door half-open.

“Okay.” He sat. Slowly, hoping to accentuate that she didn't just _own_ him, that he wasn't just something to jerk around by the cock like an animal.

Which was to say, he was trying desperately to lie even a little persuasively with every muscle, every straining bit of sinew. It was ridiculous, a failure. The candor in his slacks was an unsparing indictment. Of what, well, it wasn't that he didn't know.

He did. All too well. About too fucking _much_.

It was unreal, the one phrase that throbbed behind his eyes. _It's not fair._

What wasn't fair?

That he was with Shenhua?

That he wasn't with someone else?

That he was in this fucking city?

That a dead man's cash lay in his wallet?

That Roanapur needed to be a moral potter's field, a place of lost souls haunted and roaring with inarticulate pleas for relief?

That his bosses had proven that Tokyo was no different? Or that maybe the likeness had broken some fundamental talisman, an indispensable _belief_ above all other beliefs, that there _were_ those differences in life. Maybe that was it. That he'd always known. Always fucking _known_ they were nothing but animals, Tokyo or Srebrenica or Baghdad or anywhere that humanity huddled, tamped down and tamed and ravaged and settled, anywhere that humanity erected buildings and called civilization while they rutted in their own sanitized filth.

“You have bad look in eye, Lagoon boy.” She didn't ask if he was unhappy, because that wasn't the question. It didn't matter if anyone was happy or not. Things happened. Her nails traced long ruby creases over his cheeks. Her eyes were mesmeric.

That was the word. Black, curtained in ruddy shadow like blood. Everything was blood, wasn't it? Closer, closer, knelt with a grace that should have had anyone applauding her quadriceps.

“You think I pretty, Lagoon boy?”

“You're the most beautiful woman I've ever seen.” It was true. Superficially, she was.

“Prettier than Lagoon whore?”

“Yes.” He was disgusting. It was still true. Her smile quirked up, even crueler than he'd ever seen it.

“Mean you not blind. I am prettiest woman you ever seeing. Prettiest woman ever _touching_ you.”

“Jesus.” A hot stripe snapped the words from his lips; a scalding thread was stitched into his left cheek now.

“I mark you now, Lagoon boy. It mean you belong to me.” Daubing the blood on an outstretched tongue. “But that okay. You fuck with me, it mean you fuck with Mistah Chang. Fuck with Mistah Chang, it mean you and everybody you care about dead.

“So it only thing you can do, anyway.”

“Yeah.” He knew it was true. And tasted the blood even thicker now with her palm's hot _crack_ on his cheek.

“You not be stupid boy. You _say_ it.”

“Fuck-”

“Say it.” Admonishing him. Ordering him. What the fuck did he expect?

“You're right. I belong to you-”

“But it don't mean I belonging to _you_ , office boy. You got that? Mmm... Now Lagoon boy look so _sad_.” He wasn't. Wasn't frothing with the fury that should've been bloating through him, either. Her lips were just so _achingly_ close.

“Tell Shenhua what office boy want.”

What was it?

Her soft mouth cradling him?

Her palms on his chest?

Her hips slapping at his?

“A kiss.” A quirked eyebrow answered him.

“Kiss? You just like girl.”

“Maybe.” It didn't matter. She did. Laced her fingers up through his hair, sparked a hot ripping electricity that chainsawed through him with the nails' graze along his scalp.

“You are pretty boy.”

“Yeah.” Slowly, slowly, less any conscious movement and more a surrender to the earth's slow pivot, she crept nearer to him. Her lips monopolized him; his universe melted down, reformed itself in her face's image. If he closed his eyes, she'd still be there.

They settled together. Patiently, a silent textureless lightning that blasted through them. Her kiss was something sublime. Lips sticky and brilliant with gloss-varnished carmine didn't flatten but only spread over his. It wasn't impatient; wasn't the violence he'd always fetishized with a woman like Revy, like that Sister from the Ripoff Church.

Like Shenhua. It was gentler than he'd ever felt. Gentler than even with Rumi. Her hands scalded Rock's cheeks. Shenhua's tongue was rich, oiled satin, coiling from her mouth. An intruder that felt nothing like an invasion.

They lingered. Slowly, slowly, pulled together with a senseless and thoughtless gravity. Her body wasn't _light_ ; not quite. Delicate, lean, an arching muscular beauty, its heft settled on him; breasts full and gracefully fettered in the qipao and still tumbling unrestrained with anything more than a simple bandeau Rock could vaguely feel through it.

Perception widened even while his world narrowed until they crunched together and died ignominious deaths. A hand on his chest; a sinuous unhurried glide to his slacks. Tugging at the belt; jerking down the zipper with a prolonged rattle that lasted about three thousand years too long. And it was freed.

Sticky with what she'd wrung from him.

“You smell like you hungry now, Lagoon boy.” Shenhua's hair, shiny, lush, became his world, obliterated his sight; her breath, hot with the liquor and pungent with the meal and still so achingly fragrant, teased itself over his cheeks, puddled in Rock's left ear while her hand tortured him. Slowly, slowly, laced around flesh that had flared up again, ripped through that nacreous puddle's skein.

“You all sticky, Lagoon boy. Too bad you can't suck yourself; I making you do it instead of doing it myself.” Falling, falling. His tie loosened; that tension that announced some meaning in its pageantry bled off like embers flicked from an _obon_ fire. His collar had fallen open; her fingers were a silent grace, slipping open each button.

“You have nice body, Lagoon boy. Seawork good for you.” It was fucking ridiculous. And it was true. He _did_ ; or it was becoming, anyway. Nothing like Dutch's heavy sinewy strength; not even Benny's, languid computer nerd that he was.

But what was just _skinny_ was filling with a patiently cohering muscle. And she was there. Knelt now, without anything like genuflection. Cradling it with both hands, jutting obscenely from his opened pants.

“So hot. It feel good, yes?” Cooing up at him. She clearly knew what _she_ desired; if it coincided with his wishes, well, that was just lovely. Slowly, slowly, a vulpine tongue, pink and silken and warm, swept at the swollen pink. “All dark. You sunbathe naked?”

It wasn't exactly true. He _worked_ almost in the nude sometimes; just like Dutch and Benny did, stripping down to his shorts to toil on the deck seething with creaking metal violence, clopping around in his loafers while Revy bayed her opprobrium at what a fuckin' dumbass he was. Just wear that shirt I bought ya, Rock, so at least you won't look like such a dork.

“No. Just... Dark-skinned there, I guess.” It was incredible. Her complexion was _paler_ than white. Lady Death. Bleached bone. Juxtaposed artfully against him. She pulled him deeper now, tongue wheeling around the rim; a soft wet little sputter announced the suction that he more than _felt_. Lived it.

Men became _that_. It was a simple truth. They were nothing but waddling cocks. Maybe it was true, what some roaring bitch who'd clapped a hand on his shoulder, shitfaced and obviously mistaking him for someone else, had screeched into his ear.

 _You're all just a goddamn guided missile for sperm. That's all you are. A- a fuckin' **vehicle**_ _for insemination. A turkey baster with legs._

Well, good evening to you, too.

He wondered if it was true, though. Wasn't it? With all the shit men _did_ because of what? What he'd seen, heard? In Japan _and_ here and everywhere else?

And still, still, women were poisoned with a craving for it, weren't they? Swallowing him deeper, deeper, pitching into a red velvet delirium. Fever crept up through his cheeks; inflamed him; tortured his brain.

It felt so fucking feeble. There was nothing rational in this.

A wet cough when it grazed her throat.

“O-oh, Lagoon boy _very_ nice. Very big. Bigger than many white guy. Very nice.” Fingers twisted around him now, brandishing it aloft, confronting him with its bloated head like a pistol. “You should suck cock sometime.

“It very _interesting_ perspective on all of it. Would you suck cock for me? For Shenhua?”

What?

“Ah, well-”

“Hah! You expect woman to suck cock, but _you_ don't want trying? Is silly. Is just a little bit meat.” Kissing it again; tongue thrashing out to flit and flicker and flutter. It was a merciless pounding rhythm now. “Let me tell you secret, Lagoon boy.” Rearing up.

Her lips were still _brilliant_ with the gloss; almost nothing had slathered itself on him. Her tongue snaked out, jammed itself between his lips. Stained with him. Thick like clotted cream; pungent and sharp and a little bilious and disgusting with liquor.

“What you think, Lagoon boy? Is tasting good?”

“It- it's okay-”

“You eat cum, Lagoon boy?”

“Not really.” He didn't. He'd tasted his; some bleary intellectual curiosity. _Well, what the hell **does** it taste like? Oh. Well._

“Let me telling you, Lagoon boy. I wish I had cock like that. I would do the fucking a _lot_. It feel so good, yes? Men love their things. They always wanting stick them _everywhere_.” Shit, that was true.

It didn't matter. Nothing mattered. Her mouth, her tongue, her world became _that_.

“You liking music when fucking, Lagoon boy?”

“Yeah. I guess so. You do, Shenhua?” She was standing again. Well, that...

That didn't capture it. Mechanically, yeah, it was the act of rising. But the somatic poetry Shenhua poured into every quirk, her hips' every twist, her legs' every pivot and contortion, the muscles' achingly delicious shiver through her soft tight skin, it was... It was sublime. Unselfconscious and still with a dancer's elegances. Bare feet sighed over the carpet. The room's cleanliness was something almost anal-retentive. She had a maid. Probably. Not that the psychotic maid's costume wouldn't be a delicious prospect for her.

“What you want listening to?”

“You're asking me?” Greeted with a wry little glance over her shoulder. Her ass flared out; hips cocked.

“Cute little boy. Of course I asking. Lagoon boy is my servant now. Servant needing good care, too.”

“Uh... Do you like Gordon Lightfoot?”

“ _Edmund Fitzgerald_ too depressing. That not get me wet.” The laughter was enough almost to send him rocketing at her, snapping his arms around a wasp waist.

“Uh, _Sundown_?”

“Okay. I have _Sundown_. It okay. Is naughty piece. You know words?”

“Yeah. I do.”

“She real big slut. He real pathetic doormat. He wanting to leave, but he addicted to woman. To woman like a drug.” It was true. Her earrings' tufted tassels plunged through hair like onyx some divinity had spun with a smile into silk.

“Yeah. I'd say so.”

“I no know you like Gordon Lightfoot. Is cheesy but _good_.”

“Yeah.”

“Stand up. Drop your pants. Take off shirt. You making me uncomfor-ta-ble. And taking off socks now, please. Look stupid when man only have socks on.” So he did. It wasn't exactly a striptease; quick, workmanlike, it wasn't as if he exactly had the hips or the rhythm that could even _kiss_ it with a bit of the erotic.

“I like body. Is nice. And pretty face. You look good in wig.” Rock laughed. What the hell else could he do? That was something he'd learned. Ultimately, whether you wept or you screamed or you howled or you just _laughed_ , it still came. Reality still came. You reconciled yourself with it. _That_ was the agency you had.

It must have been like any war.

“You think so?”

“I like watching pretty boy get fucked. You ever want getting fucked?”

“Never tried.” Her smile was even huger now.

“Lagoon boy know _just_ what to saying to make me happy.” Was she happy? Was that happiness for her?

The way she danced across the carpet. The way her bare foot settled on his knee. They were beautiful.

“You like lady feet?”

“I love everything about beautiful women.” It was true. And hers were.

“I have pedicure. Every week.” She sure as hell did. And it was polishing an already sublime sculpture that any master would have envied to suicide. Dainty toes with nails predictably defined in ruby; soles like wet silk against his skin. “You like?”

“I love it-”

“Showing me now how much.” Even _knew_ could only have known what it meant. It would've been obvious to the terminally dense, to the brain-damaged, to the newly-lobotomized. His palms cradled the elegantly arching sole; fingers adored her ankle. Eased it with a prodigious exercise in balance for her closer and closer to his lips.

Serenaded with breath's sharp intake that flared her chest through the qipao's tight embrace when it slipped up, closer, closer, closer to his lips. A clean scent of feminine sweat and perfume and some novel powder.

A tongue darting out to indulge himself with a taste; a puppy's inquisition. It had enchanted him. Women didn't complain about a kiss between the thighs, along their calves; there was still that giggly uneasy _wince_ , that fear that roiled febrile in the black bleak places between his ears, that he'd hear the judgment in it.

 _What a freak. Oh, so **that's** it. You're some kind of **fetishist**_.

It wasn't that.

It was just _every_ inch. If he could clamor to bury his tongue in a woman's scalding sweet skin, why the hell not _there_ ? Shenhua obviously wasn't complaining. She was simply _delicious_. That was the only word. Fabric and skin.

And _her_ . Her sweat; that was what it had been. Out-of-body, dissociative, but not _quite_ ; his eyes from within and without, admiring his mouth cradling her toes, tongue sliding out to dart and stroke and drag low hot guttural rasps from her lips.

“Ngn... Very _good_. Lagoon boy is making me good feeling now.” There was still that high trilling quality, but transposed down about three octaves now. Strange; unreal. Everything was unreal. Gordon Lightfoot on a CD player; the recording whispered with with the guitar's sharp treble, the near-alto voice.

The lyrical lament.

_Lookin' like a queen in sailor's dream, and she don't always say what she really means..._

_Sometimes, I think it's a shame, when I get feelin' better when I'm feelin' no pain._

He could've recited them with Lightfoot. He'd felt them, too.

And now _this_. Her foot vanishing deeper, deeper, tongue coiling over lush golden lily topographies. Holding her; _kneading_ her sole and feeling only a spattering electric tension rip through every inch.

“So good. Making _Mistress_ Shenhua feeling very good.” It was Chinese.

“Speak Chinese to me, won't you, Shenhua?”

“How I order Lagoon boy if I speaking Chinese?” As if there would be any real ambiguity.

“I understand more than I speak.”

“If you lying, I making Lagoon boy _pay_.” The smile was quite the invitation.

“Okay.”

“Maybe you wanting me make Lagoon boy pay.”

Maybe. But his mouth was busied again with her foot; jammed deep, _crammed_ into it. No gentleness, shit, being irrumated with a size five.

“Lie back, Lagoon boy.” But she indulged him. It wasn't the usual sharp braying Mandarin he'd heard; wasn't quite the slow sonorous Wu that was closer to Japanese than anything he'd heard but Korean. “If you can't _really_ understand me, you're gonna learn fast just how _mean_ I can be.”

Huskier; hotter.

Her English was higher and shriller than her Chinese.

So he fell back.

“Cute little puppy-dog.” And there was something flintier, coarser. A heel dragged along his chest; toes pricked at what felt like nothing more than Tokyo tower spearing up out of his crotch. “Wag your tail for me, little doggy.” It did; thrashing, shivering, with a slow sinuating caress, high arch cradling it, swollen thick dark flesh ground against his belly.

“Close your eyes.” Darkness draped him, consumed him. “You're such a good, _obedient_ little doggy.” Displacement; air's slow swirl over his skin, but something profounder than just that.

He was being pulled into an abyss. She was the suction; she was the warp. Kharybdis. But he wasn't Odysseus. There was no one waiting for him. No Penelope for him.

Nothing.

It was...

Perfect. Her lips a scalding brush on his left thigh; her teeth a brutal _snap_ at his right.

“You like pain, little doggy?”

“I do.” It was true. It must have been. Why the hell else would he have welded himself to Revy, to the Lagoon Company, to this _city_?

“Really?” And another bite. A fucking vampire's. “Don't you dare open your eyes, little doggy. I guess you _do_ understand Chinese. Too bad. I wanted to beat you 'til you screamed.” It wasn't some jovial tittering bit of put-on menace.

It was real. No riding crops daintily swept at his ass with a giggle and cheeks flushed so thickly they'd almost shine black.

She _would_ hammer him 'til he bled. And he was bleeding _now_. Teeth like fangs sinking deeper, deeper, and he felt it. Blood's sticky syrupy heat. It wasn't just that it didn't dim that carnal enthusiasm. It was bloating higher, thicker.

“Look at _this_.” Delicious fingers wound around him. A pull; a tug. “Your blood just tastes _so_ sweet, you know, Lagoon boy?”

“You hate my name that much?” His eyes wouldn't open, _couldn't_ open.

“How _cute_. You really hate _Lagoon boy_ that much, do you?” She stood; he felt it, _saw_ it painted in whispering wind across his eyes.

“I... I don't know. I like my name.”

“Which name is that? Rock? That's a stupid name.” And she was slipping into that shrill chinglish Revy sneered at. “Is very stupid name, yes?”

“You think so, Shenhua?” So of course he'd answer her in his shitty Chinese.

“Fine. _Shí_. Is that making Lagoon boy happy?” Shí, huh?

“Does it make you happy, Shenhua?”

“Open eyes now, Shí.” How could he not obey? “If you mine now, maybe it meaning you need new name. Shí good as anyone for rock-headed man.”

“I think you're right.” She was achingly beautiful. Incredibly.

“What you looking at, Shí? Stupid man. You looking too long at me.”

“You're beautiful. I wish you'd keep the dress on-”

“Who say I take dress _off_ for shitty little rock-headed doggy? Little bitch-doggy. I keeping dress on because you not deserving seeing Shenhua _naked_.” Fuck. That was enough. Her tits were incredible; _that_ was the regret. They were probably heavier than Revy's, _impossibly_. Legs longer; body shapelier; not that Revy was anything but feminine, but there was a hard-edged rangy athleticism that hadn't swallowed Shenhua's body.

It was delirious.

And now she was stalking closer, closer. She'd set _Sundown_ on repeat; he sure as hell wouldn't complain. Not even about Yanni.

One leg sighed over the mattress' silken skein; it tortured his bare skin. She was drifting closer, closer, closer, in the thighs' graceful twist and knees' languid pivot. Music had become something distant, an imperfect hollow sensual counterfeit. _She_ was his universe; every sense melted into Shenhua. Into her simple presence.

Gordon Lightfoot meant little but just a faint twanging guitar. This woman, this succulent figure of the sexual divine, she was more than just a queen. Empress. Closer, and closer, and closer.

“You like what you seeing, stupid man?”

“Yes. You're gorgeous, Shenhua-”

“Who say I want stupid man's praise?” Even while she preened. Even while a hand _belted_ him across the cheek. But hers was probably a strength that could grind stone into dust with a caress. It was consciously moderated. He thought.

What did it matter? It definitely didn't dim _that_. Swollen, an angry raw lust, straining up, up, up.

“You sick man, you know, Shí. So cute. And so sick. You so sick. Slut fuck you like this, too?” There _was_ an answer.

An emphatic and urgent _no_.

But...

“Oh, that so cute! You not wanting to answer. It mean _no_ , right? Slut not even _touch_ this. Is so sweet.” One long brutal nail dragged a long tingling seam down his belly, came to rest on that ridiculous thing's root. That was really the source of every man's trouble, wasn't it? Squeezed.

It would just be _so_ simple to have it carved off at the stem.

He wouldn't need to feel _this_.

He could be like Saint Augustine. Cast it off; live with purity and... And, fuck, her touch. Her fingers wound around it; it was a mistress' hand's pull at a dog's lead. It didn't matter what purity and saintliness and godliness you could breathe into human flesh. There was _this_. The sensuality in everything. Palm silk grace against his cock.

Ground up.

Falling down.

Every thought was riven open with that spattering wet lightning.

“You like pain?”

“I must-”

“Slut must be very shy. She look at you with hungry eyes. Girl know. She went back for your useless ass when you taken by those Muslim. Make it very strange, she no touch you. I thought fo' sure whore want your cute ass.

“Maybe I was _wrong_. Maybe slut really just big lily who like using Shí as punching bag.” Maybe _that_ was true. It didn't matter now. “You eating me out now.”

There was no argument; no complaint. Nothing but just darkness curtaining him. And resolving with a slow wipe into something intoxicating. Absolutely bare, glabrous tight skin draped with rich ruby silk. A fine seam slipping open with its own hungers, honeyed threads dribbling down a cleft like an overripe peach.

He gawped.

Awed.

There was no gentleness. Fingers twisted into his hair; nails raked at his scalp; a sure and ferocious purchase and now a collision, _hammered_ at his lips. A hiss of breath and lush treacly lust on his cheeks, his mouth.

“Oh. Oh. You eat _Mistress_ Shenhua now, little bitch-boy.” He would. He did. Her command was simply that: A command. It was his wish, but that was little more than coincidence. His desires hadn't melted off, evaporated like morning mist in a nuclear holocaust's throes; they just didn't matter. And he knew it. _Felt_ it.

Dragged closer, closer, painted with her. Scented with her. Stained.

“Oh, now you smell like me; you have _Mistress_ Shenhua smell on you now, bitch-boy. Is very good smell, isn't it? Is smelling like perfume, yes?”

“Yes. Yes.” It was. Sweet. A sumptuous essence of moral rot and sexual perfection; cantaloupe purified of its treacly-festering qualities. It defied language. His tongue knew it like any other animal. Slipping up, up, tracing a long trembling stripe across her. Answered with an achingly patient and long and slow tremor that gathered like the world's end, rearing up from her ankles' fine arching grace and scrawling through strength tensioned into braided metal cables in her calves, through her thighs, shooting along her taut belly.

“Oh. Oh. Is _very_ good feeling now, bitch-boy. You have tongue like girl. You my girlfriend now, bitch-boy.” Who could complain? Well, he sure as hell wasn't. Sprawled on his back, pinned under Shenhua, feeling his shoulders being _mounted_ , his face cradled, straddled, ridden bareback. “You- you making me feel _real_ good now, bitch-boy.

“Oh. Oh. Is very nice. Is...” Dipping, coiling, swiping, striping. Blind but for _her_ ; a universe of flesh crammed into his eyes. But he could feel it, know it, _taste_ it rearing up. “Fuck. Fuck. Bitch-boy making me feel _very_ nice. Such good tongue. Bitch-boy learn to eat pussy from _somebody_ who was not taking second-best. Oh...

“Very nice. V-very... Very...” Thoughts melted like ice tossed into a blast furnace nestled in a desert wadi. Didn't even dissolve so much as just _sublimate_. They were gone. Vanished.

 _Washing_ away.

“Ah... Is good girl better than boy. It okay if girl come too fast.” And she had. Not that _explosion_ Rock had felt, that sense of apotheosis, rearing up higher and higher and higher until there was only a dizzy breathlessness like oxygen debt and then the _falling_. Just coming.

A sharp pang and her breath stopped for a fleeting little second, and then it just _kept coming_. More, more, ground with her hips' rhythmic pitch up and down along his lips.

“Push tongue inside! Don't be pussy!” With her pussy? Oh, what a wit he was. His jaw was already screaming, straining, but what did it matter? Cranked open further and further and further. “Make like you blowing me, bitch-boy. That good. That _very_ good. Is what _I_ want.” And that was what everyone who mattered wanted, then. Yes.

Yes.

He felt it. Her thighs becoming his universe's ambit. Circumscribing everything.

But other strange prickling bits of sensation creeping through it. Toes brushed on his chest while she arched, trembled; while muscle strained and then slackened, relaxing only to tighten more, more, more.

“Yes. Yes. Is good.” Nothing could be said; nothing but a low plangent little groan slithered through his lips. Gasping for breath, staining the world with her. “Oh, oh, you sound... You feel like little _bitch_. Girl have best lips for pussy-eating. Is so sad. Girls no have cocks for riding. But _you_ feeling like...

“Like little girl right now, bitch-boy. Oh, best of- of both... Hyuh...” A grunt and a coo and a keen and a roar mashed together into a paste and hurled through a ceiling fan, splattering every sense with _her_. With a wet greasy spurt lunging up from her.

“Oh- oh, oh, make me _come_ , little bitch-boy. I going to just get all lazy and want to sleep like little puppy if you keep making me _come_ like that. Oh. Without even tasting the good thing you have between your legs, bitch-boy.

“I want to trying now.” Just dragging herself away. Her laughter high and resonant like crystal caressed with silver talons. Long, lean, tall; a weird and twisted perspective stained in the most grandiose chiaroscuro in Rock's eyes. A finger slipped into her qipao's collar; buttons eased open, slowly, slowly, one and two and a third.

Her chest flared up, gracefully cradled in a silk band that a quick tug just jerked away. Shenhua's breasts were plump, soft, hand-filling in their extravagance, a lavish upturned loveliness; nipples standing proud and clamoring, a tawny cast only a few grades darker than skin that whispered of bleached porcelain.

He said nothing. What the hell was there to say?

“You like my tit-ties, bitch-boy?”

“Yeah-”

“That good. Too bad I not fucking you with them. Maybe some o-ther time.” Would there be another? That wasn't a question to be asked, either. He didn't matter, right?

Wasn't that it? Not knelt. Just sinking onto him.

“I riding you now, bitch-boy. I like name for you. Is good name for little Shí, yes?”

There wasn't an answer.

Her palm _crunched_ at his jaw.

“I asking you question, stupid bitch-boy-”

“Yes! Yes! It's a perfect name for me-”

“For who?” And another blow. Her hand clenched in a fist, _hammered_ down into his chest. And it didn't matter. It wasn't just enthusiasm. It was fanaticism; craving, clamoring, pleading for her, even with the bruise that'd probably be gathering as some candid confession, a hue like an ugly sunset.

“B-bitch-boy-”

“Oh, that _very_ good. I like hearing that. Call yourself bitch-boy, okay, unless I asking you not?” Dipping down to paint those words into his left ear with tingling wet breath. “Okay?”

“Yes. Yes. Yes.” Grasping him; so fucking hard she needed to _crank_ it down away from its flat snap against his belly to be properly upright.

“Oooh, I starting now, bitch-boy. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Oh!” Brushed. Just once. A fleeting little graze. Sopping, sodden, a greasy honey delirium against him. “Yeah. Oh... That feel _very_ good. Is very thick. Better than being long, I thinking. Yes?”

What the hell did he know?

And it was obvious. Answer, keep his perfect unbroken silence, well, there would still be her palm on his cheek. And there it was. And then the back of a hand; the instant she just _fell_ , let her hips drop like an express elevator to some dreamy subterranean paradise. Clapped against his skin. He filled her. Wholly, with one urgent plunge. Rock was absolutely transfixed.

It wasn't because he hadn't felt a woman's touch, her kiss, her warmth, anything more intimate than Revy's fist on his jaw for months. It was the simple eroticism in _Shenhua_. In a spine that was whispering of some erotic wavelet in its balletic twist; in the impossible malleable boneless grace that rippled and shuddered through her; heavy tits trembling with breath's long gasp dragged between scarlet lips and the heat pricking through even the thick pancake foundation swept over soft cheeks.

Language failed. Always. Always. A novelty in every woman but this was the first Rock had ever felt _bare_ . And it wasn't some devastating epiphany; a few micrometers of latex weren't exactly a gulf between humans. And still, still, there was an urgency, a _richness_ that he'd never known; no one could, could even aspire to savor it without that one inimitable point. The sodden lavish sweetness in a woman's skin without obstacle, without barrier, without anything but only your own fallible senses intervening.

Shenhua's eyes were a black hole; not just the event horizon, the simple precipice, but the genuine article. Dragged deeper in a huge wheeling recursiveness. He was there, and not; was eaten and digested and rejuvenated again with every breath, every pulse's every throb. Hers and his. It was something almost amniotic, the hearts' rhythms pounding closer, and closer, and closer, until there was little more than a thump-thump, thump-thump, separated by time so infinitesimal that it barely even existed.

She wasn't just there but was everything. Coiled around him, serpentine and strong and _crushing_ ; a sense that he was about to suffer something that he could drink on at the Flag for a few centuries if he survived the experience. Every new palpitation roared through him, became hot-lead fingers kneaded with roiling oil twisted through his nerves.

He didn't scream; _couldn't_ scream. There was the will, and the craving, but simply not the flesh's power. Weakness. The back of a hand punctuated her hips' first languid roll. Lips shivered; blood had already begun to weep in forlorn threads like rivers of hot gelid fire down his chin.

It only strengthened, gathered more, more, more. That was the word. The abiding fanatical all-you-can-eat word. More.

“Oh, oh, that _very_ good, bitch-boy.” Adoring her; cradling her in his eyes. Snapped against the ceiling fan whose endless regular _whomp_ stirred the sticky air that never quite grew stagnant and was still undisturbed with the city that lay perfectly still outside the window. It was there; people lived, and they died, and they tasted every ugly and glorious gradation between them.

They meant absolutely nothing. Mattered less than nothing.

His hands strained with the desire whose enormity was the essence of steam blasting and bloating up every vein, down every artery. Breaths dragged deep into his lungs while she just _devoured_ him. The word was just consumption.

He was there for her to eat.

“Ah. Ah. Very good, very good. Yes. Is feeling very good. Oh. Going...” There wasn't praise; the adulation was something sublimer than any trivial words. And they'd wafted off, evaporated like a satiny haze from roiling tea water. Shivering around him; a frisson plaiting itself through every muscle and nerve and tendon. Everything in its relief and still so achingly beautiful.

Perfection layered on perfection. Toes tangled in the sheets; heels twisted; fabric wrenched and coiled into unreal little ripples. Shenhua's voice heaved at Rock's ears, washing over him again, and again, and again.

The word _orgasm_ was just something menial, language to capture the phenomenon that still failed beside the _real_ essence, the philosophical. It was the noumenon. Didn't matter how fucking pretentious it was: That's _what_ it was. Battering at him. Her blood pounded with a timpani frenzy around him, long rolling vacillations in soft wet-silk skin.

“Oh... Oh...” Groans and gasps and those low guttural _uh, ah, oh, ih..._

Soft. So soft. So achingly _soft_ . And an awareness monopolized, dominated, with her. The lights bled misty and orange into her silhouette, jungle princess with skin like fresh cream cradled in hair that had grown damp and a bit matted with sweat that sprang from her. She could sweat; it wasn't just that she could sweat, but she _did_ sweat, delicately and still so prolifically. It'd probably ruin her dress. She didn't seem to care, to give even half-a-shit about it.

“Ngn... You get too lazy, bitch-boy. You start moving now.” Still; perfectly still. Unpretentious fanged hunger. There was no _need_ for the palm on his cheek; for the fingers rising up in exquisite cruelty around his neck. They were still there. They still were announced with first the right hand's, and then the left's, snap on his face.

“You so pretty, bitch-boy. I am barely believing you _boy_ at all. Ah- ah, much less with _this_ big thing. Don't just lie like dead fish. Make me think I _raping_ you. Unless bitch-boy want to be raped.” No brain cells were invested in teasing out the vagaries in _that_. “Is that it, bitch-boy?

“You afraid of me?” Falling, falling, falling; a blink and she was already there, fangs glinting with a bleached-bone violence against his cheeks. “Is that it?”

“No.” He wasn't afraid; it wasn't that. Wasn't terrified of _Shenhua_ uniquely, anyway. It was everything. More than anything else, it was Rock. Rock terrified Rock; or maybe it was that Rock _horrified_ Rock. Everything he was doing. Everything he'd done. This wasn't some poetic capstone. It was just another of those moments in a life that had begun to be paved from the same blood-rich black stone that _their_ lives were. Benny. Dutch. Revy. Even Boss Chang. Even Shenhua.

When you lived amongst wolves, that was what happened, wasn't it? When you lived with wolves, first, you cowered away from the wolves, even while you were entranced with the grace and beauty people called _unnatural_ because they'd forgotten what nature meant.

And then you started to savor their eyes' cold yellow flash in the dark, in the cool forbidding forests thick with shadows so great and so deep that not even their prey had browsed through them with damp satin noses. And then you learned to run like the wolves, still conscious of your difference; always, obsessively stewarding it, knowing that you _weren't_ one of them, and they knew it, too. You could canter along on your hands and feet, but they weren't paws.

Until they started to become them. Until you started to bleed into them; until their scent became yours, and yours died away quietly and unmissed. And then you started to howl like them. And then you started to eat like them.

And if anyone that had ever known you stalked into the woods after you, they wouldn't even recognize you unless they saw your face. But that quick darting silhouette, that was a wolf's, too.

So he let his hands settle on her hips; sliced through the steep perilous slit and knew her skin's delirious richness, its softness. Felt the flesh dimple with fat's most achingly _perfected_ kiss, layered on the muscle harder than wrought iron.

“Such _nice_ hand. You should be getting manicure. Too much callus.” As if _that_ would be a hope. Her ass flared out, lush, soft, round, achingly cool against his palms. Skin yielded oh so faintly; her spine limned a long poetic arch, a guttural wet spray from her lips staining his cheeks.

“Oh, oh... You like girl's butt, huh?”

“Yes. Yes-”

“You should be touching it, then, stupid man. Think I not clean?” Rock had definitely never savored _that_ invitation. A brush; a prod; dipping into that lush hollow; skimming a pucker that was like nothing more than simply a star winking distantly on the horizon in its novel creases.

“Ngn... So good. I am liking my butt. You do, too, Shí?”

“It's- it's incredible-”

“ _Touch it_ , stupid man. Touch it. But not dry; don't be retard.” Addled, delirious, even _he_ wasn't that stupid. Fingers slathered themselves with the juicy syrupy lust bubbling around him; coaxed dark hot senseless whispers from Shenhua.

“Ngn... Very good. Very good. Is smart thing to do.” And then a graze; once, and again, lingering there. She'd definitely savored it more than once; not slack but just slipping open with a graceful ease, smearing spittle on his fingers now, adoring the warm earthy essence of skin on his tongue jumbled with _her_. Only her.

Something absolutely unplaceable. It was; just was. One finger dipped with a shallow stroke, little more than the first knuckle; and then a second. Twisting her apart with a roaring wet command while language obligingly slumped off to greet the nihil to which everything in that world was ultimately destined.

A few distant shots cracked with the familiar lullaby of suffering and madness and it didn't even matter. Little deaths snapped around him like a marathon through a minefield. Squeeze, clenched, groped, twisted and strained and swelled around him. It was something irresistible, the body driven onward not with the hungering idiot solipsism in masturbation but something resolutely selfish in its selflessness, or maybe selfless in its selfishness.

A woman's body in its perfected grace; every orgasm, every new delirious convulsion, heaving a renewed spasm through him.

The night's stagnant swelter had begun to grow frigid against his skin. Not with cooling sweat. The sweat never cooled. It was the body's own twisted febrile subjectivities. The individualities, the fine pointillism in explicit sensation, had just _died_ ; everything bled together, a great sexual wipe, a smear like shitty abstract expressionism that was something he wouldn't trade for a fucking Gentileschi now. It didn't matter who he was.

What he was.

Where this was. If he was sundown creeping through someone's back stairs, or if she was, or... Or why there wasn't Revy's face staining the lust and the desire and the need and the _fulfillment_ that had become something almost Pavlovian in its certitude, a coordination that was simply broken. Her face was there. Shenhua's.

Her hair. A perfume not in grease and gunpowder and metal and booze and crazed twisted adrenaline but fine orchid and vanilla and still, still, that unity in feminine sweat, in the luscious sweetness that was a woman's body. Her skin warm and achingly cool, also. Twisting and tangling together.

The slow patient pumps had died unnoticed, soldiers without markers. It heaved up; he was barely even in his own body.

He could see _another_ Rock, maybe. Another Rock who'd just let his tongue loll out like a dog or maybe a wolf in heat, who rutted with Shenhua like a rape, violent and crashing, but who was raping whom didn't even fucking _matter_. Fingers split open her ass; tumbled deeper, deeper, endlessly smeared with his spit again, staining the universe in flesh's novel grades. Two fingers, and then a third, and it was something to be felt through a fine skein like hot jelly.

Everything was being boiled, brazed together and then broken again, churned and tangled in a furnace that melted him, that poured him into Shenhua. It wasn't the fear that he would too soon, or even too late, but that _instant_ , that selfish instant, that was just an abstraction. They would for hours; maybe that instant was a thousand years, or those thousand years were just five seconds.

Who fucking know. Who _cared_.

Kissed her; again, again. Wanted her. Needed her. It was pathetic. Everything was just so fucking _pathetic_. Everything was disgusting, right? Just like this goddamned city. And that wasn't just to _say_ it.

Because god, if there was a god, anyway, had damned Roanapur. Roanapur wasn't a twisted aberration; it was just a perfectly honest reflection of the world and everyone _else_ believed it was a funhouse mirror. But that was the truth. This was humanity's _real_ complexion; this was its _real_ character. This was the truth.

A soul-curdling broth of hungers and desires.

Shenhua's toes trembled, strained, clenched on the sheets.

“Come. Come on top. Come on top. I make you fuck me _harder_ , bitch-boy.” Tumbling, falling. Atop her but definitely not on top. Just a convenient indulgence. Endless legs that were enough for probably three women tangled and twisted and knotted themselves around his waist, heels daggering into his spine. Nakedness collided with fabric; precious silk darkened with sweat. Everything was burgundy.

Everything was stained _red_ with the light's relentless splash.

Nothing mattered, did it?

She brought him here, but she didn't own him. It wasn't his defiance. It was just _her_ fucking indifference. Because she had no obligation for it. She'd freed him, hammered apart his shackles, showed him a world that wasn't more beautiful or even uglier than the delirium, the play-pretend industrial perfection, he blinded himself with: It was just _sincere_.

Money's phantasms and lust's candor and desire's grasping urgent need. No past, and no future, and barely even a present at all. But there was this. Her body. Arms wound around him; thighs and calves wet with him, with her, coiling with a sharp serpentine tension against her flesh; her tits' plump silk bulk flattening on his chest.

Being daggered into her, rising, straining against that merciless gravity, slipping its bonds in a few delusional instants before plunging again, again, again. Muscles screeched at him; palms clapped on the mattress, a deranged push-up, again, again, again, every sense hedged with Shenhua's voice that had become a scream.

His, also. Again, again, roaring and howling not against and not for anything but just _screaming_. Screaming, because that was all that really seemed to matter. Lurching, pounding, knowing the raw ache in his hips from her body against his own. Hair tugged and pulled and shoulders striped with her nails; bits of flesh were dragged off, peeled from him, flung away elsewhere into the abyss that loomed larger and thicker and more urgent.

It wasn't only that it was coming.

It was. It had begun the instant she touched him, though. Of course it _was_ coming. Closer, closer, closer. Knifing electricity; that was the only sense. A plural orgasm frenzy; colonizing the feminine, that rarefied right, that sybaritic rite that only the priestess could know, dancing in the glory of its own crazed wheeling excess, long shadows distending over obsidian walls.

Hot fire raced through every inch.

“You getting bigger, Shí. You getting _bigger_. Feeling so _nice_.” Musical; her voice was like her nails, taloned and ripping into him, spurring him further, further, further. Silky heels slapped at him; he was being torn apart, wholly, joyously.

Tirelessly.

The time didn't even matter. Every new spasm rocking her heaved him outside his own body, ricocheting back like some Hollywood flair, a defibrillator's spark.

He was dying.

Living.

That was Roanapur's essence, wasn't it? You _felt_ your life while it was being lived, instead of just knowing it as something you flushed down the next morning with piss reeking of stale office tea and the binge you hadn't even _wanted_.

Fucking her. She was fucking him, too. Grinding together.

“Oh, is _very_ good. You coming now.” It wasn't a statement of fact; it was an order, a command.

“I-”

“I not caring if you want to or not. You _coming_. I wanting feel you come inside me. Is... Is what _I_ wanting. Getting me?”

“Got you-”

“Good _bitch-boy_. That's such a _good_ bitch-boy.” Was there even the _capacity_ for affection in her, or was this it? It was stupid.

Even the words drifting overhead like a great aged orchard that no longer grew for any man's convenience, but only just because it did. Fruit bloated and bitter with rot in the canopy, begging to be picked in their fermentation.

Did she have love in her heart?

Did _he_?

“Come _now_!” And he did. It wasn't even _forcing_ himself into it, like that cheerless ritual in Tokyo, slumping too fucking exhausted for desire on his minimalist mattress in his one-bedroom apartment that cost him more than a _mansion_ did here for the luxury of just being there in that warren of neon and misty ambitions that his hands never quite made real and whole and tangible, jerking himself without sensation and finally just announcing to his body, Do it or die.

No.

It was her order that did it; that _made_ him. Let it flare up, and up, and up. Her orgasm snapping and spattering around him.

“Hold me. Put arms around me.” It was weird; it was incredible. Silk hot against his arms when he slid them under her, not smoothly or delicately but just _cramming_ them together. Knowing her body's urgent lunging arch; importuning him, more, and more, and more.

Ground, crushed, kneaded, _ravaged_.

And it was there. Not just _coming_ ; not that one discrete moment, that sensual gasp that flared into being and died like a failed sun, but a sensual universe. Gathering there, racing and rushing, snapping out in a huge splintering spray like opium-smeared glass breaking and reviving itself in strange fractal patterns and shattering again. He died, opened his eyes, and died again; again and again and again. Quaking, knowing the simple clash _there_ ; straining against her while she pummeled around him.

And it finally came. Her pussy twisting, tangling; white-hot electricity behind his eyes, misting the world in a dreamy gray; an inferno that became a chill like clamping his hand on a hot stove; tension so huge that when it sprayed out it was almost _anguish_. The most delirious kind. The most perfect kind.

A last pump and lunge and everything was still. Not by his design, but hers. Legs were suddenly iron bands fettering him; palms clapped on his cheeks. Pinioned and subdued. Bearing down and never admitting even a single _inch_ while she twitched and clutched and finally just crushed him.

“You not moving right now, Shí.” Simple truth through her voice, ragged and lower than he'd ever heard it. It crashed through his senses. Poured down his throat and pooled in his belly. “You not moving. So hot; so hot inside me.

“You come like fire hose. I thought for sure, after you mess up your shorts, you not coming _that_ hard again. You like?”

“Yes. Yes. You're amazing.”

“You want to be my dog?” He did.

Yes.

“Yes.” Why shouldn't he be?

She laughed. High and manic and drunk. Lust's mingled scents swarmed his nostrils. Cum's coppery bleach and _her_. Wet and fragrant and lush.

A hot garden.

More than that.

A funerary bouquet, like he was reading a Faulkner novel. Decadence and old world superstition and hunger and squalling inarticulate desire.

“You want to be my dog? You're sure?” Speaking Chinese now, deep and patient and deliberate.

“I don't know what it means-”

“It means what I want it to mean, Lagoon boy.” Was that it? “You'll come when I call. You'll wear a collar when I want. You'll always feel it, even if you're not _wearing_ it. Oh, that feels so _nice_. I haven't had a man's cum in me for the longest time.

“It's so hot. It feels like you're going to scald me, Lagoon boy. You know it only means you belong to _me_. I have no obligation to you.”

“Yeah. I understand.”

“Why would you want that? For pussy? You're good-looking, Lagoon boy. Sad, but good-looking. I'm sure you wouldn't have to pay for pussy in this city.”

“I know. It's not that.” What was it? Belonging?

No.

There...

Why, exactly?

Maybe it was its own reasoning. He felt her breath on his face; he felt his own. They were no different.

And then they were disentangled. Because he'd already said _yes_. Because she said she was finished for right now, and didn't want him to stay over, because _she_ needed to be somewhere else. Shenhua didn't preen.

The smile creasing her lips was more than enough. Dazzling. She was dazzling to him, snatching up the panties that slipped up her round hips like a French-cut bikini in cream. Caught a glimpse of the cum's thick viscid threads dappling her left thigh.

“I keep it inside me. It feel _nice_. And it drive Mistah Chang wild, know man's cum inside me.” Rock felt it. Cradled his belly while he just sat there on the bed, a jumbled world of half-broken red things.

He wanted to ask.

So, do you and Boss Chang?...

“Mistah Chang think you cute, too. He go both way; mostly for pretty-boy. He have big hard-on for big Russian amazon, though. She sexy, too. I go both way. It much better, anyway. Women best for women, yes?”

“Yeah. I- I guess so-”

“Men rotten. All they good for is killing. And women still better at that. Killing and cum. Women not have cum. Too bad. You better learn what it mean to be a man, little bitch-boy.” She was turning, cradling his chin in her steepled fingers like a bristling thicket of spears. “This city eat you alive.”

“Yeah.”

“Get dress and go. I wanting time alone.” Rock's eyes caught a dreamy and dazed glimpse of the antique clock on her vanity whose bronzed face was caressed with lazy shy black hands.

Already one in the morning. The city was a broken necklace of cold white and amber lights from afar. In its bowels, there was nothing but a weird diffuse aura that was some twisted insomnia, never awake but never really sleeping, either.

He slipped off, fastening his tie with a few dutiful tugs. That was what he was. But he still felt it, shoes clopping on the street. Not just her scent still draping him. It was his own, too. Because it was the forest.

He was living there now, and he couldn't deny it.

His fear had always been someone from _that_ life, his Tokyo reality, staggering into Roanapur's twisted dreamland.

He'd told himself that it was terror they'd break the spell. He'd snap awake and suddenly he'd be back in that office, stooping and groveling and bowing so deep his spine would crack like a cheap pair of chopsticks by forty. His deepest ambition would return to being a lust for something he hated.

But that wasn't it at all.

No one could drag him back. No one would try.

His hotel was a shithole, but it was tucked into a neighborhood that was something almost tranquil. Pickpockets were the most menacing street predators; hookers, the independents that still owed their livelihoods to the intricate arabesques of hierarchical sleaze that other places called crime, brandished legs stalking in plastic shoes unfurling from plastic skirts with sometimes-plastic tits in groaning plastic tops.

There wasn't a door; a simple corridor whose water dispenser hummed with a senseless idiot indifference to wherever it lay was one of the few fixtures. Revy was its security. Whether she was there or not, it would only be a word, and any motherfucker stupid and misfortunate enough _not_ to know Two Hands would be introduced to vengeance surer and crueler than the fury that turned cities to ash and women into pillars of salt.

An unadorned concrete staircase wound up to the second floor of a two-storey building. It was squat, hunched; six rooms lay along the hall, and a window stared out across a scenic back-alley where one of the hookers was rutting with a john in a dim relief against one of the fixtures that poured sulfurous light over the street. The window always was thrown open, something like circulation, but largely just capturing the place's sonic violence.

_Hey, baby! I do it all!_

_Hey, honey! How 'bout it?_

_How much for anal?_

Shit, that was _always_ the refrain. Those hammer orchids capturing their wasp of the day. Or night. Or afternoon.

He still locked his door. Scrounged up the keys, let them rattle in the heavy wooden door's latch. It was practice, habit. Normality's delusion. Revy's door ground open.

“Hey, Rock. You were out kinda late, huh?” What was the time, anyway?

“What time is it? I thought you'd still be at the Flag with Eda.”

“You know her. You can pick that slut up like a two-dollar bar tab.” Revy was tousled. Sweat clung in a lucent sheen to soft tawny skin. It was like Shenhua's, only a more candid victim of the sun's kiss like an abusive lover's. “What were you doin', anyway?”

“I don't know. I took a walk.”

“Figures. A dumbass like you'd be naïve enough to just go walking around in this shithole without even carrying a piece. And what kinda fuckhead wears _that_ office drone getup, anyway? Not even wearing the shirt I bought for you.” The eyes were yellow, a fox's eyes in the wan light. Slitted and angular and vulpine.

Revy was scented with something familiar. Hunger. Desire. Eda's perfume, too. When she craned out, he caught a glimpse of bare legs; the weird meaningless titillation in her hips' satin darkness and not only the cut-offs that didn't exactly demand a novelist's imagination. Drab maroon panties.

“Sorry about that, Revy. But you know I don't wear it-”

“During office hours, you don't wear it. Isn't that what you told me?”

“Aren't we always working?” Her smile was hollow, drowsy. Lids seamed with lead drooped down.

“You're such a dumbass. Anyway, ah...” She must have caught the scent on him, too.

Neither had any guilt. It was only natural, wasn't it? Two animals, howling in the dark.

“I'll see ya tomorrow.”

“Yeah. See you tomorrow.” Her door clattered.

And his.

Rock made a point of drifting off to _Sundown_ on the stereo.

 


End file.
